


The United States v. Xavier

by valancysnaith



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Ladies being BAMFs, Physical Torture too i guess, Poor Charles, Protective Erik, Psychological Torture, post-XMA
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-28
Updated: 2017-08-31
Packaged: 2018-07-27 05:26:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 52,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7605280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valancysnaith/pseuds/valancysnaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Cairo, Charles is arrested, imprisoned, and charged with treason for his part in ridding the world of nuclear weapons. Erik finds himself the unlikely face of mutant rights and must learn a new way to fight before the trial—or before telepathic suppression drives Charles insane. Moira and Hank lawyer up; Raven schemes; unexpected allies offer a way out. </p><p>AKA: post-XMA AU where it's not that easy to end the Cold War.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Now

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RageSeptember](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RageSeptember/gifts).



> This idea is so completely RageSeptember's that she should probably be listed as co-author. If it sounds exactly like my other story, it's not. At least I'm pretty sure it's not? I hope it's not.
> 
> Onward!
> 
> Apologies for the short first chapter, hope you enjoy, etc.

Moira started bringing him coffee one morning with no explanation. Not frequently enough to be called a pattern or infrequently enough to be called a surprise, but just often enough that when he woke up to the sound of soft footsteps on carpet and the bracing scent of a fresh brew his first thought wasn’t to send every scrap of metal in the room hurling at its source.

Anymore, at least.

Instead he huffed something vaguely appreciative, in Polish half the time, and drank the coffee in bed. From the movement of her watch he knew that Moira went for a run around the perimeter of the grounds after she stopped by his room. Hank joined her some mornings, Raven others. He thought about doing the same sometimes, but most days it was all he could do to not fall back asleep, chasing that half-second between sleep and awake when he expected to see Magda beside him and feel Nina’s locket rising and falling with her breaths from the room next door. If he could stop time, live forever in that half-second…

“Meeting in thirty,” Raven called through the door, breathless in that way that meant she’d just finished her own workout.

“Right,” Erik called back. He scrubbed a hand through his hair, turned on the shower in the other room with his powers, debated and decided against shaving today. Moira said he looked more approachable with a day or two of scruff, though she drew the line at three; there was rugged and there was unkempt, and only one of those played well with the media. He had an interview later today, didn’t he? One of the New York papers—the _Times, Wall Street Journal_ maybe. Jeans and a nice collared shirt. Would a tie be too much? Raven would know, with her shapeshifter’s expertise at manipulating perception.

He shucked his clothes on the way to the shower, leaving a trail of crumpled fabric from bed to bathroom. All of it was new. The students’ things had all been destroyed in the blast; Erik had brought nothing of his own from Poland except the twisted remains of Nina’s locket. They’d had only the skeleton of a school to come back to, which had necessitated a veritable shopping spree for essentials like clothes and food as well as the cost of reconstruction. With Charles’s assets frozen Raven had changed her mind quickly about her heritage, since being an Xavier gave her access to a trust fund and they needed the money more than she needed to make a point about human privilege.

In anticipation of the day that too ran out, Erik had emptied all his own accounts and held in readiness the funds from thirty years of hunting Nazis and taking back their ill-gotten wealth. He more than anyone knew the cost of taking on the federal government. Finances were the least of it, but he contributed in any way he could, from paying lawyers’ fees to sit-down interviews with the bloody _Wall Street Journal._ He’d promised Charles as much, and Erik suspected he’d not survive another broken promise to Charles.

“The interview is with Bryan Burrough, you’ve spoken with him before,” Moira reminded him twenty-five minutes later. “He did a couple of pieces right after Cairo. They’re in the clippings file if you want to reread them before he gets here at three. He’s against Charles but he likes you, which means we need him.”

Erik nodded. When all this began he would have snarled something vicious and uncompromising and thrown the reporter _and_ his car off the property, but he’d learned since then the value of patience, of biding his time. Well, relearned, really—they were old skills from his time hunting Schmidt, which felt like several lifetimes ago at this point. He greeted reporters with firm handshakes and close-mouthed smiles, was civil and sometimes even charming, and as a rule they went away both impressed and unnerved, wondering if they’d only imagined something unhinged in Magneto’s eyes.

“I can read you like a book when you’re angry, but when you’re calm—now that is fucking scary,” Raven had informed him one of those nights when they’d been drinking to excess in the new library. “All cold and slippery—icy! That’s what you are, icy. And I don’t have a clue where your head’s at. God, what the fuck am I saying? Pass the whiskey.”

“Thanks,” Erik had said as he handed over the bottle, because what else was there _to_ say?

“You’re still going to Washington tonight?” he confirmed, looking between Moira, Hank, and the stack of luggage in the doorway.

“The train leaves at six. We’ll call you from the hotel when we get in, and our meeting with the prosecution is in the morning.” Hank polished his glasses on his sweater, very careful of the sharp claws of his natural form so close to both glass and cashmere. Raven was blue too, sneaking a donut from the plate in the center of the table because what was a morning meeting without coffee and donuts, after all. Anyone with a physical mutation only wore their natural forms these days and those without, like Erik or Jean, used theirs as frequently and subtly as possible. The message was as clear as it was subliminal: _mutation is normal, unthreatening, nothing to be frightened of, entirely unremarkable, barely worth noticing._

So much for Charles’s better men. So much for Erik’s mutant superiority. The reopened Xavier Institute had a new mission—exist in the public eye as something so harmless that fear of it was absurd. Normalize mutation. Change the conversation. Make mutant rights civil rights. And never mind natural evolution; there was no time for it. They were sitting on a ticking time bomb, had been since Cairo.

“Ready for the headlines?” Raven said, gesturing to the stack of newspapers sitting next to the donuts.

“Anything new?” Moira said.

“Not since the indictment. But no new news doesn’t stop it from going on the front page of every major paper in the country.”

She held up _The Washington Post_ in one hand and _The Boston Globe_ in the other. In bold letters above the fold, now-familiar headlines:

_The United States v. Xavier: Telepath Commits Treason_

_Xavier Faces Charges in Federal Court, Will Wear Suppressor During Trial_

Erik didn’t realize he was grinding his teeth until he felt a stab of pain in his jaw. He’d long since lost count of the number of meetings they’d had exactly like this one, featuring identical donuts, identical coffee, and identical newspaper headlines, and yet there was always that spark of rage at the injustice of it. Always that split second when he contemplated how easy it would be to end this farce—he could have Charles broken out of the Pentagon and the two of them secluded somewhere no one could find them by the time Bryan Burrough arrived to find his interview subject missing.

But Charles had made him promise. And there was more at stake than the two of them.

“Right,” he said, icy calm. “Pass me the clippings file, Mystique. We’ve got another long day ahead of us. Let’s make it count.”

The trial was in one month. The bomb was ticking, and they were running out of time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if anyone is at all confused, things will make more sense next chapter.


	2. Then

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things go not great immediately post-Cairo, feat. earnest!Charles and sad!Erik

Erik was still deciding what to do next—run, cry, or be sick were his current top three choices—and the earth’s magnetic fields were still stabilizing when Hank stuck his head over the wall of the bombed-out apartment above and shouted for him to get up here, now. Before he could even respond there was a puff of air, a flash of blue, and he was standing on a sandy floor surrounded by exhausted, injured X-Men.

The girl, Ororo, had grabbed his arm at the last minute. Now she tilted her chin up and met their distrustful glares with one of her own. Erik would have admired her poise if he hadn’t been so entirely transfixed by the figure lying on the floor. Bald and bloody at the temples, with tracks in the dust on his face and closed eyes.

Charles’s body blurred in Erik’s vision. Tears or vertigo? Without warning he felt dangerously off-balance, mentally and physically. Apocalypse had blunted his memories and sharpened his powers but now he was beginning to remember, and there was a sense of something missing, something vast and vital. All the power he’d used as a shield against his grief was gone. He’d sunk his powers into the earth itself and hovered hundreds of feet in the air with no effort at all; now he wasn’t even sure he was standing upright.

His instinctive response was the same as always—ground himself in the surrounding metal. Every pipe, screw, and nail in the room shrieked and shuddered and for a moment he thought the apartment would collapse. Ironic, if he’d acted to save his people at the last minute and they ended up dead because of him anyway—

“Calm down. He’s weak but I brought him back. He wants to tell you something.”

The voice was young but stern, coming from barely an arm’s length away. Erik blinked, brought her into focus: the girl with red hair and new knowledge her eyes. He’d seen her walk on air, lit by flames that came from…inside her? She was a telepath but more than that and she ought to have terrified him but as Erik stared into eyes that had held fire he felt strangely grounded. Not comforted, exactly, but steadier. He let her lift the helmet off his head and didn’t even flinch when she put a hand on his arm.

“His telepathy’s come a little loose. It’ll be easier if I steady the connection between you but I won’t listen in, I promise.”

“Thank you,” Erik said. He meant for more than the privacy and her smile showed she understood that.

 _Jean,_ she sent. _My name is Jean Grey._

_Erik._

_I know. Welcome back, Erik._

Together they knelt down by Charles’s head. Jean’s face assumed an expression of intense concentration and Erik made an effort to open his mind. Calm wasn’t an option but he could at least keep his thoughts quiet, small, so that she could work around them.

_Oh, there you are, my friend._

_Charles._

They were standing inside the pyramid as it had been ten minutes ago, with the stone slabs laid out for the transference and massive statues of the Four Horsemen buttressing the vaulted ceiling overhead. Charles was wearing the same mauve sweater but free of rips and bloodstains and his hair looked just-brushed, falling nearly to his shoulders. Erik felt the obscene urge to laugh.

“You know you don’t have that anymore,” he said.

“Don’t remind me. A small loss in the grand scheme of things, but one I’m not entirely ready to deal with at the moment,” Charles said, running a hand through it self-consciously. He turned his head before Erik could see more than the flash of a smile, so brief he wondered if he’d imagined it. Even Charles, with his nearly suicidal penchant for third and fourth chances, couldn’t have forgiven him so quickly. He’d been dead five minutes ago and that was Erik’s fault as much as Apocalypse’s. The memories were trickling back, the evidence of his latest betrayals. It was Erik’s mind that had served as the conduit for Apocalypse to take over Charles and Cerebro; Erik’s powers that had taken advantage of the disability he’d inflicted in the first place. He’d thought himself above that, at least.

“You’ll need Beast to make you a wheelchair of plastic next,” he said. His throat felt tight and the words came out a monotone. “I’m sure he already has the design drawn up.”

Charles turned back, raised an eyebrow. “Oh, Lord. Let’s nip this in the bud right away. We’d all be dead without you, Erik. You and Ororo bought Jean the time she needed to unleash her power. No one will forget that, certainly not me.”

“That doesn’t change what I did.”

“No, it doesn’t. Nothing will. Just as nothing will change what was done _to_ you, or how monstrous it was. You weren’t the one in control. He was. Now he’s dead, and the burden of moving forward falls to us.”

“Us,” Erik said flatly.

“There’s a great deal of rebuilding to do. I can’t do it without you, and I mean that literally as well as metaphorically.” Charles, or Charles’s projection of himself, stepped closer. Very much in Erik’s personal space now. He had to tilt his head back to meet Erik’s gaze properly. His blue eyes glinted and his expression was one of soft understanding and he looked so entirely…himself that it was nearly impossible to reconcile this Charles with the near-corpse lying on a dusty rug in the real world. Erik’s instinct was to back away but he had locked his knees to minimize his swaying and now he couldn’t seem to move. Charles started to reach out, pulled his hand back at the last moment. Quietly he said, “I asked you to stay once. This is me asking you to stay again.”

“You’re practically comatose and this is what you wanted to tell me.”

“I’ve let you walk away too many times,” Charles said, ignoring the weak attempt at deflection. “After every battle you leave and I let you and it took me an unforgiveable number of years to realize that perhaps you think I _want_ you to leave. I’ve never said otherwise, have I? So now I am. Please, come back to Westchester. Just for a short while, just to talk.”

“You presume to know a lot about my motivations,” Erik said, hoping his gritted teeth came off as mere terseness. The knuckles of his left hand were white with the force of his grip on the stone slab at his back, though he tried to conceal how badly he needed the help staying upright.

Charles nodded. “It’s only presumption, I promise. I haven’t looked. It simply made sense, given what I know of you.”

“Everything, if I remember correctly,” Erik said, unapologetically snide. It was oddly comforting, that he could be this close to total collapse and needling Charles was still second nature. His world had turned upside down, ended in all the ways that mattered, but this one irrelevant thing was just as it had been.

Charles thought the same, if his small smirk was anything to go by. “I know this isn’t the best time for this discussion. You’re in some kind of shock, obviously, though you’re trying very hard to hide it. And I’m…well, ‘practically comatose’ was just about correct, to be quite honest. I’ll need a few days for my telepathy to recover, and I’ll probably be unconscious for most of them. But I didn’t relish the thought of awakening and finding that you’d disappeared back behind the Iron Curtain without even saying goodbye. It seemed best to act quickly.”

“I would say goodbye,” Erik said. It was an answer from the heart, with absolutely no input from his brain. He regretted it immediately.

“Are you saying it now?”

Silence stretched for a long moment before Erik said, “No.”

Before Charles could respond there was a searing pain in both their heads, and Erik found himself yanked back into the real world, on his knees in front of Charles’s prone body, with a pounding headache and chaos all around him. Instinctively he folded in on himself, dug clenched fists into his temples, barely bit back a cry of pain.

“They’re not coming to help us!” Jean was shouting, close to hysteria.

“Of course they are,” Moira said sharply. Her voice trembled in that way that betrayed she’d recently been crying but she was fierce and focused, businesslike. “It’s in their best interest to get us out of here before Egypt’s military arrives and this turns into an international hostage crisis.”

“She’s right, and it would have taken hours for us to get out of here ourselves,” Hank said. “The commander at Cairo West Air Base said reinforcements were already on the way.”

“If they were already on the way they’re not reinforcements,” Raven said tightly, like she was explaining something very simple to a child for the hundredth time. “If they were sent out before the people on that base even knew the fight was over, we are looking at a strike force, not a rescue mission. Also, I’d listen to _the telepath._ ”

Erik fought through the pain of abrupt severance of telepathic contact on top of his preexisting general disorientation. “What’s going on?”

“Moira and Hank radioed for help and now Jean thinks we’ve got trouble closing in fast,” the boy with the silver hair and broken leg said. He seemed to be trying for a tone that implied it was all no big deal, but the feigned nonchalance was entirely transparent—Erik could hear the fear in his voice.

“I don’t _think_ anything, I know!” Jean insisted. She turned to Erik like he was the one in charge, which would have been laughably absurd if he had had a moment to process it. Time had slowed to a crawl during his conversation with Charles in the pyramid only to spring ahead now at an impossible speed, like a video playing at too many frames per second. The result was almost like a series of mini-blackouts, but Erik had pushed through worse in his life and fought to focus. Jean’s red hair and frantic expression were the only clear things in an otherwise blurry field of vision.

“Tell me,” he said.

“There are at least fifty of them, maybe more,” she said. “Heavily armed with orders to…neutralize us. Every living thing in this vicinity has been declared a target. Their minds are so focused…I can’t tell if they don’t know it’s over or if that doesn’t matter.”

“Those motherfuckers,” Raven hissed. She got to her feet but slowly, leaning against the wall for support, searching the room for weapons that didn’t exist.

Moira shook her head, unsettled but clinging desperately to her conviction. “It has to be a misunderstanding, the commander said—I’ll try again, they’ll have radio contact with the team and they can abort the mission.”

She turned back the radio Hank had jury-rigged, from thin air it seemed, and Erik could hear her voice high and anxious as she tried to make contact with Cairo West Air Base again. He gave it a fifty-fifty shot that they’d even answer. But let her make the futile attempt, if it comforted her; Erik couldn’t bring himself to care. Or feel much of anything, really. The usual rage that would have filled him at the humans’ entirely predictable betrayal, the need to inflict pain to match what they’d inflicted on him—they were missing too, lost somewhere in the vast emptiness Apocalypse had temporarily, blessedly allowed him to forget. Before that there had been Magda and Nina, who had kept him from spiraling down into the near-insanity born of ten years’ isolation. And before that Charles, who had asked him to stay once, and then again. Now there was nothing and no one, and he’d never felt so alone in his life. Even the metal that had always comforted him threatened to fly apart as soon as he touched it.

“Can you stop them?” he asked Jean. “Make them forget?”

She shook her head, eyes filled with tears, and for the first time looked her age—too young for this. “If I had time, one by one, _maybe,_ but even holding you and the Professor steady was hard. I might really hurt them. I’m sorry, I’m just so tired—”

“I know,” Erik said, squeezing her hand before he could think better of it. “I know, we’re all tired. You didn’t sign up for this. None of you did.”

“What do we do now?” the blue boy said, his German accent thicker than before. Nina’s had done the same when she was scared or angry and spoke English. One look made it clear the boy would be no help either—he’d only regained consciousness a few minutes ago and looked as exhausted as Erik felt.

“We’ll think of something, don’t worry,” Hank said bracingly, glaring over the children’s heads at Erik as if daring him to disagree.

Erik might have scoffed, if the situation had been any less dire. As if an—assistant principal, or whatever Hank was—knew more about lying to children than the actual father of a seven-year-old girl.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” he said, in the same voice he’d used to soothe countless nightmares. “They’ll come to their senses once they see that the world is safe because of you. Because of mutants who stood together.”

He didn't believe a word of it, but they did. That was all that mattered.


	3. Now

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Moira and Hank go to Washington.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to garnettrees and RageSeptember for invaluable proofing and brainstorming :)

“You know the sunglasses really aren’t much of a disguise, right?” Moira said. “Add a trench coat and fedora and _maybe_ you’d have something.”

“A convincing flasher costume?” Hank groused.

He lifted their luggage down from the rack above their seats, one heavy suitcase in each furry blue hand, and passed Moira hers before following her down the aisle of the Amtrak train. The engines hissed loudly and there was a metallic shriek as the breaks kicked in, easing the final glide into Union Station. Hank fiddled with his sunglasses self-consciously as they waited in the vestibule, clearly missing the usual pair tucked into his jacket pocket.

Moira took pity on him. “Relax, I’m kidding. You look fine.”

“I’m not trying to _hide,_ I’m just trying to avoid being blinded the minute we get out there.” He tapped a claw against the wall arhythmically. “You’d think this would get easier over time. Less anxiety-inducing for us, less interesting for reporters—”

“Yet somehow it never does,” she sighed, slipping on her own pair of Ray-Bans.

Charles’s money could buy them a lot of things—enough Amtrak tickets to have the business class car all to themselves, Lincoln town cars with opaque windows, bullet-proof glass, and mutant-friendly drivers, hotel rooms with views overlooking the Mall and the Capitol Building—but even he couldn’t restrict access to Union Station, the biggest transportation hub in Washington DC. And all the money in the world couldn’t keep reporters away from a court case that made the Rosenberg’s trial look like traffic court in Duluth. Moira and Hank were on a first-name basis with some of the ones waiting outside now—the team from the _Washington Post,_ the local CBS affiliate, the Newsweek reporter whose photographer changed every other week. A kind of comradery was bound to spring up once the routine was familiar. But it still didn’t make the first few seconds of painfully bright lens flashes or the constant repetitions of “no comment” any more pleasant.

And Hank had a point. It was tough to go incognito when you were giant and blue.

“I shed everywhere, I have to have everything opened for me, I can barely read a book without tearing every page,” he had pouted before their first trip.

 “Sorry, Hank, but the aesthetics are important here,” Moira had said. “The more visible mutations get shown on camera in positive contexts the better. And like it or not you’re about to become one of the figureheads of mutant rights. If you’re not in your natural form people will ask why and they’re not going to accept ‘it’s inconvenient.’ Self-loathing or shame make much better headlines.”

The same went for Raven, who’d gotten an abbreviated version of the same lecture from Erik a few days before, but Hank was a special case. He and Moira had been officially appointed liaisons for the defense a few days after Charles’s arrest. “The defense” was technically only Charles but implicitly the entire mutant community and their human supporters, so Hank and Moira had requested and been given permission to act as his defense counsel despite their total lack of legal expertise. They had been making the same trip from Westchester to Washington at least once a week ever since.

Not lacking legal expertise in the slightest was the prosecution, headed by a young U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Robert Kelly was smarmy, smart, and ambitious, blond and handsome in that generic Midwestern way. “A photogenic bastard,” as Raven put it. He smirked more often than he smiled and was clearly banking on this case easing his way into politics. That seemed a fair bet, considering how frequently he entered meetings accompanied by Caspar Weinberger and William Webster. Letters of recommendation from both the Secretary of Defense and the Director of the FBI would help him skip quite a few rungs on the ladder to success in Washington, and all Kelly had to do to get them was convict Charles Xavier.

He obviously didn’t think that was going to be too much trouble.

“Think we’ll have protesters today?” Moira said as the train doors slid open. They set off down the platform at the usual clip, her heels clicking fast as she tried to keep up with Hank’s longer stride.

Hank hummed thoughtfully. “Maybe a few. Numbers will thin out soon, though. They won’t be able to bring their kids when school’s back in session.”

“Well, that’s something. Bigoted parents I’m used to, but we’re banking on the next generation being better than us and there’s nothing like a five-year-old with a ‘God hates muties’ sign to make me wonder if we’ve lost already.”

“We can’t think like that,” Hank said firmly. “We’re not going to lose. Mutants _will_ become an accepted part of society and Charles _will_ be found innocent because the alternative is…extremely unpleasant.”

The alternative was Erik’s way, and was referred to euphemistically even when they were several states away from him. Just the thought of it was ominous enough to have Hank and Moira pick up their pace and hit the main terminal at a speed that forced the wall of reporters to choose between giving way or literally being body-checked by nearly seven feet of muscle in a misleadingly harmless-looking blue furry body. For a breathless few seconds the sensory overload was total, and then the flashing lights and shouted questions were behind them and they were home free, diving into the waiting town car and slumping against the soft leather in relief.

“Hey, Robbie,” Moira said to the familiar driver as they peeled away from the curb. Then, pointing across Columbus Circle—“Oh, look, Hank, there’s our welcoming committee.”

It was a motley assortment today. The far-right, deeply evangelical and even more deeply mutantphobic Capitol Bible Church had organized protests of thousands just after Cairo, vitriolic crowds a hair’s breadth from erupting into violence and barely held in check by cops that not-so-secretly agreed with them. They’d surrounded the White House, choking Lafayette Square and Pershing Park, pressing up against the gates of the U.S. Treasury and the EEOB. They’d moved to Union Station the next week when Moira and Hank offered better targets for abuse, but those thousands had dwindled to a scant few dozen by now, at least half children. Their signs showed evidence of wear and the chants for Charles’s execution were so tired and familiar that it was difficult to remember how terrifying they’d been at first.

Moira, who had spent the first few rides to the hotel in tears, had stopped crying a long time ago. The bigots they needed to worry about these days held office, not signs.

It was either incredible or depressing, the things you could get used to. By now it was automatic, checking into their usual room at the Willard Intercontinental, unpacking bags and hanging suits up in the closet, spreading out files on the antique desk. Moira ordered dinner up to their room while Hank went down to the lobby and called to check in at the mansion, speaking quietly in short, sometimes coded sentences. Bugged phones and rooms were a standard assumption, and anyone in the hotel lobby could be a CIA or FBI plant, or a reporter—though which was worse depended on the day and how much the media cared to demonize Charles this week.

“Well, Erik didn’t kill the guy from the _Wall Street Journal,_ so that’s something,” Hank said when he got back up to the room.

“Hurray for small miracles. Now we just need a big one.”

From her reclining position on one of the beds, Moira jerked her head at the television. Projected under Dan Rather and the CBS Evening News logo was a breaking news headline: Reagan Makes Xavier Trial, Nuclear Rearmament Focal Points of Campaign.

Hank cursed extensively and creatively. “This was today?”

“In Ohio, this afternoon. He’s in reelection campaign mode already, though if it wasn’t going to be a landslide before it sure as hell is now. Nobody wanted nuclear weapons but now that they’re gone the world can’t get them back fast enough. And no one makes the case for Cold War escalation like President Reagan. Is it escalation if you’re starting from scratch?”

“Fear-mongering with bonus anti-mutant sentiment for seasoning,” Hank muttered as he flopped down on the bed next to her. They sat shoulder to shoulder for a few minutes, watching the footage of the speech with that critical dispassion the last few months had forced all of them to develop in the face of ideas that should have been too viscerally horrifying to process or too absurd to take seriously. That there could be charges against any of them at all had seemed like a bad joke at first. A handful of mutants consisting mostly of untrained teenagers had saved humanity from literal apocalypse—the world owed those kids parades, medals of honor, thanks at very least. But there had been no cameras to capture the X-Men’s heroism in Cairo, and billions had watched in horror as the nuclear arsenals of their countries and their countries’ allies had gone soaring into the stratosphere. They saw their defenses vanishing, and no amount of protesting that the danger had vanished too changed their minds.

Or at least not the minds that mattered. There were pockets of support for Charles in some countries, small groups that hailed him as a hero, but the Cold War was a global mindset, bigger and more insidious than the weapons used to fight it. It was unstoppable, backed by politicians and a military-industrial complex that had only grown more powerful since the Vietnam War, the whole force of which had come crashing down on Charles Xavier. Moira had a feeling that only the unforgettably public nature of his “crime” had saved him from “accidental” death in government custody. Even now she worried that every time she saw him would be the last.

And there was absolutely nothing they could do about it except eat club sandwiches in an historic hotel and try to predict how that smarmy shit Kelly would use Reagan’s campaign promise to the prosecution’s advantage.

“I suppose we’re lucky the President pretended to be neutral for so long,” Moira said tiredly when the broadcast was over and the television muted. Dinner included two cups of black coffee, brewed strong and much-needed. It was barely 8 p.m. and they were already exhausted.

“If all that bullshit about justice and punishing those who put democracy at risk and no tolerance for the enemies of freedom counts as neutral,” Hank said. “Just because he never said Charles’s name doesn’t mean he hasn’t had it out for him all this time. And even if he didn’t, Cap Weinberger does, and the President listens to him.”

“Weinberger should be thanking us,” Moira scoffed. “Now he’s got every reason to expand the defense budget _again._ Billions of dollars worth of it were just shot into space. Congress is going to give him billions more without batting an eyelid.”

“Let’s not lead with that tomorrow,” Hank suggested dryly.

Moira rolled her eyes but laughed a little, as he’d meant her to. He knew it wore on her—not just the work they did in Washington, but being away from her son so often. They’d both moved into the mansion together and she missed Kevin; more than that, she worried about him. The Xavier Institute was the most protected place in the world for mutants, but even that wasn’t saying much, and their frequent emergency drills through the escape tunnels Erik had built into the new foundation reassured Moira more than the mansion’s defenses and the X-Men’s training. Hank spent as much time as he could in the lab when they were in Westchester, rebuilding the X-Jet, designing an invisible electromagnetic shield to surround the mansion, installing alarms and security cameras, but in Washington he was limited to corny jokes and offers to listen, if Moira ever wanted to talk.

“We need to be very careful about Cerebro,” she said, shaking off her momentary depression and tapping its schematics contemplatively. A lot had changed in the past twenty years but so far she still seemed to prefer working to talking. “Charles could resist enough to send his own message in Cairo but not when Apocalypse’s control was enhanced by Cerebro. We have to differentiate between those two while saying as little as possible about a machine specifically designed to enhance telepathy because _that_ is a can of worms we do not want opened.”

“Right, let’s steer the conversation _away_ from the possibly-stolen CIA tech,” Hank agreed. “We’re leading with the usual demand to confer with our client personally, aren’t we?”

Moira nodded, and they got to work. It was going to be a long night.


	4. Then

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to X:Men: Law & Order Edition, feat. Historical RPF
> 
> (lol what am i even doing)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so sorry this took so long! i could not figure this chapter out. hopefully it makes even a teensy bit of sense.

“Not this again,” Peter groaned, blinking awake slowly.

On either side of him Hank and Raven came back to consciousness in the same way: twitching, moaning, prying their eyes open only to slam them shut against the bright fluorescent lights. Scott yelped in incoherent pain from somewhere across the room.

“What _happened,_ ” Jean slurred as she sat up. She squinted through a curtain of dusty red hair and then said, sounding much more awake, “Um, guys? Where are we?”

Whether it was her mutation or habit after so long relying on her reflexes to survive, Raven pulled herself together first. She managed to sit up, shielding her sensitive eyes with one hand and feeling for the nearest surface with the other. The material depressed under her fingertips but only barely—not the tarp of a standard-issue military cot, but nothing that could be truthfully called a mattress either. There were eight besides hers, set in two lines the length of the room. Everything was blindingly white and the air smelled like disinfectant.

“That’s right, you missed out on Stryker’s new toy the first time around,” she said as she processed their surroundings, talking mostly to keep Jean calm. “Knocks you out with an electromagnetic pulse or something, Hank said. The team in Cairo must have had one too.”

“I never even saw them,” Moira said. She prodded the back of her head experimentally, winced, sighed with relief when her fingers came away clean. “They must have used it from around the corner. They never meant to help us at all.”

Hank struggled through his own headache to muster his usual conciliatoriness. “It’s not your fault. You had no way of knowing.”

“We can parcel out blame later,” Raven said. “Let’s get some answers first.”

“Um, yeah, because I have a few questions,” Peter said. Squeaked, more accurately. His forehead was crinkled with pain and confusion. He was still half-prone, propped up on his elbows and staring down the length of his body at his broken leg. His jumpsuit had been cut away just above the break and the bone set by someone who knew what they were doing, if the smoothness of the white bandages wrapped around it was any indication.

“Me too?” Scott rotated his shoulder carefully, examining the cast on his broken arm like he expected it to explode any second. “Like why kidnap someone and then give them medical care? And what’s wrong with those two?”

He pointed to Erik and Ororo. They were lying on beds next to each other furthest from the door, still asleep or unconscious and showing no signs of waking up. Their armor had been stripped away to the black shirts and leggings underneath; small cuts on their faces had been covered with butterfly bandages and Ororo had a few stiches above one eyebrow. Both looked younger in sleep, Ororo her actual age and Erik momentarily reminiscent of the wetsuit-clad—kid, really, they had pulled out of the Miami waters decades ago. Raven blamed that flashback on disorientation, shook it off. Hank was saying something about electromagnetic sensitivity, Stryker’s device affecting Erik and Ororo more strongly because of their mutations, possible repercussions from Apocalypse’s control over them. Raven tuned him out too. There was something she was missing, something she’d seen but not registered—

No. Some _one_ she was missing.                       

“Charles,” she said.

The blue streak she swore matched her sprint to the door. By the time everyone looked around and realized there were nine beds where there should have been ten, she was already rattling the lock and pounding on the door. Some kind of thick synthetic material, deadening sound and impossible to break through. She threw her body against it anyway.

“Hey, fuckers, where’s my brother? I know you’re out there! _Where is he?_ ”

“Raven, Jesus, calm down!”

Hank wrestled her away from the door just as the lock clicked and it swung open. Raven broke free of his grip immediately but stopped, breathing heavily, assessing. The man who stepped inside was young and handsome, brown hair lightly gelled, brown suit perfectly pressed. Crooked smile, easy manner. He didn’t look military. He looked like a small-town lawyer, a college professor maybe. But there was an air of unconscious authority around him, the confidence that came with power, and he didn’t seem afraid of them at all.

“Dr. Xavier is perfectly fine. Just occupied elsewhere, I’m afraid,” he said.

“Sir,” Moira said, surprised, at the same time that Raven blurted, “I know who you are.”

The man chuckled. “Yes, you’ve probably seen my picture on the wall all those times you’ve infiltrated FBI Headquarters. Nice to finally meet you in the flesh, Mystique. And Agent MacTaggart, I’ve heard exemplary things about your work at the CIA.”

“Thank you, sir,” Moira said automatically as Raven shifted her weight, uncertain. _In the flesh._ She’d had the same innuendo-laden phrase thrown at her countless times when she was in her natural form by men who leered and ignored her face in favor of staring at her breasts, but this time it sounded different. Not lascivious, not objectifying. Like this guy understood that her disguises weren’t _her,_ but at the same time no one was entitled to her natural form. She decided who saw her and how, and he seemed to respect the real her more than any of her conventionally attractive disguises. Raven felt slightly off-balance at that.

“To the rest of you, I’m William Webster. I run the FBI here in Washington.” He took in their shocked faces, gave a helpless little shrug as if to say _ah, what can you do._ “Yes, I realize that comes as a bit of a shock, but we thought it best to get you all off foreign soil as quickly as possible to avoid any…diplomatically murky waters, let’s say. We can protect you better stateside. I hope the extended sedation didn’t cause too many unpleasant side effects.”

“We’re being held by the FBI so you can protect us? That’s your pitch?” Peter said doubtfully.

Webster spread his hands, another folksy comforting gesture in a seemingly endless arsenal of them. “It sounds rather ominous when you put it like that, but it’s the truth. Only a temporary measure, of course. As you can imagine we don’t have as much information as we’d like on what happened in Cairo—no boots on the ground, all recording devices and satellites glitching with the magnetic interference, general chaos. So we’d like to debrief you all individually, gather as much new data as we can. After that you’re free to return home whenever you feel recovered enough to travel.”

“Say what?” Scott said.

“What’s the catch?” Raven asked, more coherently. She’d recovered her composure and skepticism with it, and all of this was way too good to be true.

“No catch. An hour of conversation with a few of our agents—you might even know them from the squash courts, Agent MacTaggart—and you’ll be on your way. Easy as pie, as they say.”

“Not for the Professor,” Jean said, cold and clear.

She had been quiet since her first words, her face chalk-white in a way that made her hair look even brighter than usual. Her forehead and mouth were pinched with lines of pain and she had a faraway look that anyone who knew her knew to mean she was struggling with her telepathy. The unflappable Webster blinked.

“Are you reading my mind, Ms. Grey?” he asked.

She narrowed her eyes, more irritation than intent. “Would you like me to be?”

“Jean,” Hank said warningly.

“Don’t worry, Dr. McCoy, I understand that everyone is a little shaken, circumstances being what they are. I won’t take Ms. Grey’s reminder of her strength as a threat.”

Webster smiled, serene in the implication that he could. Here, now, in FBI custody hidden away from the eyes of the world, they were entirely at his mercy. Anything could happen to them and no one would know. Words could be put in their mouths, security footage could be erased, reports invented out of thin air to describe how the dangerously powerful telepath had threatened the Director of the FBI, who had feared for his safety and—

For the first time they all understood how easily this entire situation could spiral completely out of control. Raven and Hank exchanged glances, falling back on their old ability to think along the same lines, the way they had escaping from the Alkali Lake base. _We can’t fight our way out of this. Not while the kids are hurt, not while they’re holding Charles hostage. Play along. Careful, careful._ At the same time Jean stopped rubbing at the pain in her temples, aware that the gesture could be misinterpreted, and twisted her fingers together in her lap, exhausted and miserable. She’d barely recovered any of her strength or control since Cairo, despite prolonged unconsciousness—that would take restorative sleep, not forced sedation. Now, no matter how determinedly or carefully she reached for them, her powers slipped away like water through open fingers. She said tentatively, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—but what’s going to happen to him?”

“That’s not up to me,” Webster said apologetically. “Unfortunately Dr. Xavier has…punched above his weight, I’m afraid. The amount of danger he’s placed our country in by destroying our nuclear arsenal is incalculable, at this point. We can’t in good conscience release him from protective custody until we have a handle on the amount of damage he’s caused.”

“Sir, with all due respect, damage to what?” Moira said, recovering her powers of speech first while the rest of them remained stunned into silence.

“You name it, Agent MacTaggart. International relations—our ability to protect ourselves and our allies. Economic growth—thousands of scientists, researchers, and engineers have just lost their jobs. Billions of dollars’ worth of programs and initiatives that had yet to be revealed to the general public are now useless—”

“And you should be thanking him!” Raven interrupted, finally finding the words to voice her outrage. “There’s nothing to protect ourselves _from_ anymore—Charles destroyed that too. It wasn’t just our nuclear arsenal, it was the nuclear arsenals of every country in the world. The playing field is level now, the Cold War is over and my brother ended it single-handedly. You should be giving him a Nobel Peace Prize!”

“Also, not to be a dick, but he did just save the whole word, so I kind of think you owe him?” Peter pointed out.

“You’re both right and I’m sure those points will be taken into account,” Webster said agreeably, entirely unmoved. For the first time his voice hardened. “But if you think the Cold War is over simply because the nuclear deterrent no longer exists, you are severely uninformed as to the insidiousness of the communist threat and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Dr. Xavier has endangered us immeasurably in regards to both.”

Before Raven could respond—though even she didn’t know what she would have said—there was a soft groan from the far side of the room. Hank, who was closest, looked over just as Erik’s fingers twitched. Deep frown lines appeared in his forehead and he exhaled the same quiet noise of pain. Hank estimated they had about two minutes before Erik clawed his way back to consciousness, simultaneously sending up a silent breath of thanks for the lack of metal in the room.

“Then there’s the matter of Erik Lehnsherr,” Webster said, as if he’d only just remembered. “By one interpretation of events, the CIA has just recaptured a dangerous fugitive who still hasn’t paid for the attempted assassination of President Nixon ten years ago. But it could also be argued persuasively that Magneto played a critical role in defeating this Apocalypse and has more than earned a presidential pardon for his former terrorist activities. He can walk out of here a free man with the rest of you, secure in the knowledge that he has the gratitude of the President and the American people.”

“You’re not giving us a lot of choices, here,” Raven said tightly.

Webster straightened his tie, gathered up the files he’d never opened, moved toward the door. All the fussy, fidgety movements of a man who’d already disengaged from the conversation. “I’m giving you two choices, actually. Help us or don’t. I’ll let you talk it over amongst yourselves. I’d like to say there’s no rush, but things are still a bit chaotic upstairs. Your debriefings would certainly help us decide how to proceed with Dr. Xavier.”

Five seconds after he left, Raven ripped the door off a cabinet filled with medical supplies and threw it across the room hard enough to dent the opposite wall, a growl catching in her injured throat.

Thirty seconds after that, Erik opened his eyes and said hoarsely, “What happened?”

“We’re fucked, that’s what happened,” Peter said. He flopped down on his back again and heaved a sigh toward the ceiling. “Absolutely, totally fucked.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stick with me, dudes, I promise things are about to get way more interesting. 
> 
> But like, is this currently just the most boring story on the planet or is it actually confusing? There's the back and forth in time AND the POV switches--the first two were Erik's, the last two have been more omniscient, on the group as a whole. Should I pick one and stick with it?


	5. Now

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charles is here! Sort of!

They never got much notice before the calls. Sometimes the night before, sometimes only an hour ahead of time. In direct violation of the telephone company’s wishes, Erik had installed landlines in nearly every room in the mansion and instructed anyone who heard the phone ringing to pick up immediately, no matter what time it was or what they were doing. Hang up at once if it was anything but urgent, and if it was anyone from the Department of Justice, get the phone to him immediately.

Once Scott hadn’t found Erik in time. The official on the other end had hung up and Scott had spent three hours magnetized to the ceiling.

Last night the call had come just before midnight. The voice on the other end, so monotone it sounded robotic, had said the usual, then added the window, which always varied: “Your request for a brief, monitored conversation with the defendant Charles Xavier has been approved. Please be available tomorrow after 6 p.m.”

At three in the afternoon Erik locked himself in the study after warning the students that anyone who bothered him for anything short of another apocalypse would regret it. He allowed himself one glass of scotch—enough to calm his nerves while he waited but not enough that he’d still feel it by 6 p.m. While he forced himself to savor it and not toss it back all at once, he played chess against himself and lost badly. Then he paced for a bit, restless and anxious. Plucked a few books from the shelves and flipped through them without retaining a word. Tried to catalogue improvements he could make, details he’d missed; they’d rebuilt the destroyed mansion quickly, perhaps a little haphazardly, but Erik had spent more time on this room than into all the bedrooms combined. Still, it wasn’t perfect. Hank had remembered more of the contents of Charles’s study than anyone else, but Erik was certain the bookends had been pure silver, not stainless steel, and the candle holders on the mantle hadn’t been gold-plated either.

The minutes crept by like eons. He thought of calling Raven over the intercom but she was in the middle of a training session and, although she’d still show up, he knew exactly the look she’d give him. That _Really, Erik?_ sigh, combined with the _Are you kidding me?_ eyebrow. If Raven had ever been maternal, it hadn’t been recently.

With Moira and Hank so busy with the case in Washington, that meant the kids came to Erik when they needed something that didn’t involve the X-Men. And _that_ was…

Something he desperately wanted to talk to Charles about. Not the only thing, or even the most important thing, but still something he wished they could discuss late at night when nothing existed outside of the two of them, if only for a few hours. Erik had envisioned those quiet moments, rebuilt this study around the mental image of them. He’d drawn on memories softened with time and colored by nostalgia of the two of them sitting in this room—but in new chairs, now, and a new chessboard between them. All that was missing now was Charles.

But Charles _was_ missing, and so there were a hundred never-begun conversations in Erik’s head.

_Ororo came to me today. She’s frustrated that she doesn’t understand some of the slang the others use. She wants to fit in here so badly that she asked me to tutor her in English. I wanted to say no but…I told her I would think about it._

Or, one exhausted Monday:

_The entire house awoke psychic agony at 2 a.m. Jean says she can’t sense you but I can’t help wondering if there’s a connection between her pain and yours. Did your connection deepen after she went into your head in Cairo, perhaps deeper than she knows? And what did they do to you last night?_

Other days were more banal.

_Give me a chef’s hat and have done with it, Charles. I spend enough time cooking for these hellions that you may as well give me the post. Save you the trouble of hiring someone. Whatever your sister does to them in that room makes them eat like they haven’t seen food in years. I remembered my mother’s roast recipe the other day…_

Tonight was already a bad one. His fingers kept going to the crumpled metal of Nina’s locket warm under his shirt, drawn by that subconscious, obsessive urge that overtook him sometimes to touch the one thing he had left of her. His metal-sense was hyperaware of the imperfections in the silver. Iron, from the blood he hadn’t quite managed to purge entirely. Twisted plastic and gelatin, remains of his parents’ photograph. All he had of his entire family fit on a plain silver chain in a pendent the size of his thumbnail. Even now, waiting for a phone call from Charles who was in infinitely more pain and danger, Erik couldn’t shake his own grief, or the slow-burning shame and resentment that twisted around the thought:

 _They’re children. But they’re not_ my _child._

The phone rang at 5:39. Erik picked it up before the end of the first ring.

“Yes.”

A different voice from the night before, but equally monotone. He wondered if they trained them to talk like that.

“This is a call from #0001, also known as Charles Xavier, for recipient Erik Lehnsherr.”

“I’m Erik Lehnsherr,” he said tightly. For all that he’d identified himself to more strangers over the past few months than he’d met before in his entire life, the name still felt strange on his lips. He’d been someone else for so long. _I’m Henryk Gorski,_ he’d told his neighbors when he and Magda had made the obligatory rounds to introduce themselves in the village. _I’m Magneto,_ he’d told his former colleagues—men he’d almost considered friends—with every intent of killing them all. And twice in his life he’d only been a number.

One of those numbers was Charles, now.

“Put me through to him,” he said, hearing the anger in his voice. It was protocol to refer to Charles by his prison number, these peons clearly had a script, but every time it happened Erik wanted to break something, and often did. No time now: there was a click as he was put on hold and the call was transferred. Erik took two deep breaths, shoved his anger aside, pasted a smile on his face. You could hear someone’s expression through the phone, and wasn’t there something about even faking a smile lifting your mood? He’d take all the help he could get.

“Erik?”

“Charles.” Bracing—he always meant to sound bracing, and invariably it came out too soft, too relieved. He forced wry amusement into his voice, the hint of a reluctant chuckle. “You’ll never guess what your sister had your X-Men doing today. Landscaping, if you can believe it. She wants to put an obstacle course in the southwest corner of the back lawn. She had Scott and Ororo clearing trees, Jean moving ropes and beams and ladders, and Peter assembling obstacles all afternoon.”

A soft huff, almost like laughter, came over the line. “Did she really?”

“Quite the taskmaster, your sister.”

“Always was, when there was something she really wanted.”

There was a breathlessness in Charles’s voice today that Erik didn’t like. There was no predicting whether he’d be cheerful or depressed from one phone call to the next, whether his energy would run high or low, and they didn’t have the luxury of easing into conversation or the freedom to say what they liked. Everything was timed and monitored. By necessity Erik had learned to intuit his mood based on nothing but the way Charles said his name. Now that intuition told him that something was wrong, something had happened—

He rambled on while his mind raced, barely paying attention to the words. “I told her to be careful of those oak trees along the lake. I know how much you like them. They’ll give you somewhere to sit in the shade while she makes the children go through their paces for you.”

“The X-Men, Erik, not the children,” Charles chided.

The gently sarcastic response came naturally. If he closed his eyes Erik could almost pretend things were as they should be, with Charles sitting across from him, the whiskey and the chessboard and the gentle teasing. “Whatever you say, Headmaster.”

“I’m not—”

“It’s still your name on the gate, Charles. It’s still your school,” Erik interrupted, forcing calm where he felt only outrage that Charles should sound so lost about such an obvious truth. “I’m only minding it for you until you come back and take these brats off my hands.”

“You love them, you bastard.”

 _They’re children. But they’re not_ my _child._

“They’re alright,” he said nonchalantly. With any luck Charles missed the pause before his words.

There was a beat of silence, easily taken as awkwardness by the guards, lawyers, or spies listening in, but they had no way of knowing how comforting Erik found it to just listen to Charles breathe over the line. To have proof that Charles _was_ still breathing. He’d never been able to ask, but from the way he never rushed to fill the short silences he suspected Charles felt the same.

“I saw Hank and Moira a few days ago,” Charles said at last. “They want to bring in a psychiatrist from Princeton to meet with me. If he agrees that I don’t have a propensity for violence or history of extreme, spontaneous behavior, he could testify that I wasn’t in my right mind when I set off the missiles. Do you think it’s a good idea?”

“Do you?” Erik said carefully. He couldn’t say what he really thought, which at that moment was something closer to a scream than actual words. He cast his powers out into the backyard where a dozen trashcans were set close together, far enough away that the sound wouldn’t carry to the house, and tried to ground himself in the cheap metal.

Charles sounded hesitant. “It feels like the prelude to an insanity defense.”

“You weren’t insane, then or ever. You weren’t in control of your powers, _he_ was. You couldn’t have stopped him and I know because I was there too, between both of your minds. I’ll testify to that.”

“Thank you, Erik. You don’t have—”

“Stop it,” Erik interrupted, crushing a few of the trashcans into tin pancakes so his voice didn’t crack. “How else am I supposed to get my free time back, hmm? I’ll do anything it takes to get you back here running this place instead of me.”

“Very big of you.”

Charles huffed that same tired laughter and suddenly Erik couldn’t bear it any longer. He’d never heard Charles sound so exhausted, and beyond that—uncertain? Confused? The gut instinct he’d felt from that first breathless noise had transmuted to a sick conviction that he was missing something crucial. The trick was to be gentle but firm; Charles would prevaricate given the opportunity, insist he was fine and try to turn the conversation back to the school. With an effort Erik kept his voice smooth and steady, his questions in the tone of statements.

“What’s wrong? Something’s happened, I can tell. What have they done to you?”

“Nothing, I promise,” Charles said too quickly. “Nothing we didn’t expect, anyway. We knew there would be a suppressor for my telepathy.”

Erik searched for words, found none. He felt suddenly sick and loathed himself for even noticing his own discomfort when Charles must be feeling infinitely worse.

“I had my first fitting for it earlier today…or possibly it was yesterday? Recently, at any rate. It’s a bit…difficult to shake off.”

“Charles—”

“I’m fine, Erik, truly. I’d rather they perfect it now than slap some malfunctioning prototype on me the day of the trial.”

Erik could read between the lines on that. The sick feeling was replaced by a sudden, soaring fury. He threw his arm out violently and outside the once-trashcans went hurtling hundreds of yards deep into the woods, fast enough to sever a limb. “They’re experimenting on you?”

“No, it’s not—”

“We had an agreement,” Erik said from between clenched teeth. “They treat you well and give you a fair trial and I’ll cooperate but one hint that you’re being shown anything other than _exceptional hospitality_ at the hands of the United States government and I’ll call the most well-attended, unscripted press conference the world has ever seen.”

“Erik, they’ll end the call if you don’t calm down,” Charles said, voice gone tight with tension. “Please don’t make me wait days or weeks to talk to you again. Please. I can’t—I want to hear more about the school.”

“The school doesn’t matter, Charles, _you_ matter—”

Now more frigid than frantic, Charles broke in, “As heartwarming as that is, if you could stop playing nursemaid for half a second you’d realize the school matters far more than I do and, while I can manage quite well without your protection, it can’t.”

“You’re right,” Erik said, after nearly biting his tongue off. He could keep his voice calm, at least, even if his whole body shook with rage. And Charles _was_ right—the continued existence of the school was more important than any of them. The Xavier Institute as a symbol of mutant strength and security mattered more than any individual mutant attending it. That was the party line, at any rate; it was only important to Erik because it was important to Charles, but he wouldn’t have shared that even if the call hadn’t been tapped by half a dozen federal agencies and departments. He played along because he’d made a promise and because half the time he believed it—until Charles was in danger (well, immediate danger, rather than the usual kind) and then the rest of the world ceased to matter entirely.

“It doesn’t hurt,” Charles said. “The suppressor. Know that, at least, won’t you?”

“Yes.” Erik laughed a little, wondered when his eyes had grown wet. “I’m supposed to be the one reassuring you.”

“Reassure the children. Reassure Raven she’s a good teacher and Hank and Moira that I appreciate all their work.”

“Yes. I will.”

“They’re telling me I have thirty seconds. Tell me about the school.”

Erik closed his eyes and let the words flow, as many as he could fit into thirty seconds. He’d never been a talkative man but he was learning, on these calls with Charles. He focused his powers on the large grandfather clock in the corner, feeling out the second hand as it ticked the world’s fastest thirty seconds. “Your sister let Jubilee join the X-Men after all. She’d taken to ambushing Raven around the house to prove she had the tactical skillset necessary for your elite team of teenagers. Annoyed her into submission, finally. The hallways were becoming positively hazardous. Peter broke into your liquor cabinet for gin to help them celebrate and training the next day went badly but they’ve straightened out since.”

“Time’s up,” Charles said, as Erik felt the second hand’s the thirtieth tick. “Take care, Erik.”

“I’ll talk to you soon,” Erik said evenly. Which was true, for a given value of _soon—_ he always submitted the next request for a “brief, monitored conversation with the defendant” as soon as he hung up from the last conversation, but even when the government wasn’t deliberately stonewalling him, bureaucratic red tape meant that request could take weeks to go through. The line went dead. Without even setting the phone down in its cradle, Erik immediately made the usual call to the Department of Justice, requesting another opportunity to speak with #0001, Charles Xavier, as soon as possible to discuss urgent developments in his ongoing legal proceedings. Then he poured two whiskeys and hit the intercom to the Danger Room.

Raven’s voice came through after a few seconds, breathless and annoyed.

_“What do you want, Erik?”_

“They’re perfecting prototypes for the suppressor,” he told her.

A pause. She knew what that meant as well as he did. Then a loud bang as she slammed her palm into the wall right by the speaker. _“Like hell they are. I’ll be right there.”_

Erik took a preemptive and excessive sip of his whiskey while he waited for her, sunk into the armchair that he had envisioned using while he and Charles played chess. One day that mental image would become a reality, but now wasn’t the time for games. Prisoner #0001 had been held indefinitely under dubiously legal circumstances and experimented on by government scientists who were not only unscrupulous but cruel once before, and Erik was determined to prevent it from happening again.


	6. Then

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Feat. weak-as-a-kitten!Erik and hero!Hank

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh look, someone's throwing up--must be a valancysnaith story!
> 
> (why am i so insistent on including all bodily fluids but the fun ones???)

“You’re out of your mind if you think I’m leaving without him,” Erik said hoarsely, scowling.

Unfortunately he suspected that, with a slight tremor running through his whole body and sweat beaded on his forehead, his fiercest glare lacked its usual panache. He and Ororo had spent their first thirty minutes awake vomiting into bedpans Raven found in the cabinet she’d broken. That was a few hours ago now, or at least he thought it was. Sometimes his vision went blurry for long moments or he felt so sick he had to lie down and when he could function again he had no grasp on how much time had passed. More people were in the room, or less. Raised voices alternated with hushed arguments. Everything was in chaos but no one seemed to need him for anything. Someone had put a blanket over him at some point and he wrapped himself in it tightly; the sterile air felt much colder than it had at first.

“Some kind of withdrawal symptoms on top of general shock,” he heard Hank murmur to Moira at some point. “Ororo was under his influence for a longer amount of time but Erik seems more affected by the separation. In theory their mental states prior to his taking them over could be contributing—”

Erik missed whatever he said after that and when he opened his eyes again Hank was no longer in the room at all. Instead there was Raven crouched on her heels next to his bed where he could see her without lifting his head, telling him that they had to leave now or they might not make it out at all. Her words were impatient and her tone tried to be but it was no good; even after all their years apart he knew when she was genuinely worried about him.

“Come on, buddy, work with me here,” she said, tapping his cheek lightly.

“Not without Charles,” he repeated stubbornly.

“I tried, Erik, I really did.” Her voice wavered and he wondered if the brightness in her eyes was the headache-inducing fluorescent lights or something else. “It’s not going to happen. You don’t know how lucky we are that they’ve agreed to debrief you in Westchester in a few days. But if you don’t walk out of here under your own power _soon,_ we’re going to start hearing phrases like ‘hold for observation’ and ‘monitoring recovery’ and then all the cameras in the world won’t make a difference.”

Surely he’d missed something, because only half of what she said made any sense. “Cameras?”

“Every functioning news station in the world wants to see the mutants who stopped the apocalypse. That’s what they’re calling him. Apocalypse. There are hundreds of cameras out there and they’re our best chance of making it out of here in one piece. If the world looks away, I don’t trust these creepy suits one bit.”

Erik managed to prop himself up on an elbow, which put one hand at the perfect level to brace his head; it had never felt so heavy. Or empty. He imagined rocks rattling around in his head, bruising his brain and echoing drum-like against the outer edges of his skull. Then Raven was tapping his face again, closer to a light slap this time, telling him to pay attention and oh, Hank was back too. Hank’s blue fur against Raven’s blue scales reminded him of Charles’s blue eyes—

Either he’d come through the worst of the withdrawal or that thought cleared his head just enough to function. He rewound the conversation with Raven, replayed it this time with meaning attached to the words. Took brief stock of himself. Watery muscles, a pounding headache, and an alarming spasm of pain when he reached out with his powers. The few pieces of iron and nickel around him—mostly screws in the beds and cabinets, washers, the interior of the sink in the corner—shook ominously, threatening to splinter apart. Or melt, perhaps. He pulled his powers back before he could find out which it would be, flinching at even that small effort. It was the first time he’d ever been grateful that a room contained minimal amounts of metal.

“Help me,” he ordered, and used their arms to lever himself upright and then to a precarious standing position, grunting with the effort. His stomach lurch, calmed reluctantly.

“How are you feeling?” Hank asked, with real concern or an excellent imitation of it.

“Useless. My powers…”

“Ororo’s too, and Jean’s. It’s understandable that your mutations would take some time to recover after such extended, amplified use. They’re like any muscle that way.”

Erik looked around the infirmary. The others were all sitting or standing, mobile at least but obviously not in fighting condition. There was a grey tinge to Ororo’s dark skin; Jean’s shoulders were hunched miserably and even Moira, who was in the best shape of them all, looked like she could sleep for days.

“We’re not fighting our way out of this,” Raven said, like she was the mind-reader in the family. “We wouldn’t stand a chance. We have to get out of here and regroup.”

“And leave him.”

Hank sighed, frustrated. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but as I understand it he’s…well, not safe, exactly, but not in any immediate danger. He’s still unconscious and receiving medical care. _Only_ medical care. I don’t know what the government’s up to, but whatever it is, they want him healthy for it. That buys us some time.”

Erik’s teeth ground together audibly but he was so tired and sick he could barely string together a sentence, much less a coherent argument.

“If they were going to kill him he’d be dead already,” Raven said, much more pointedly.

“Are we so sure he isn’t?”

“Let’s find out,” Hank said. “That’s what I came to tell you. I got Webster to agree to provide proof of life. They won’t tell us where it is, but they’ll show us live video feed of Charles’s current location. As a ‘gesture of good faith,’ if we do the same afterwards and cooperate with them.”

Erik swayed a little, partly from surprise and partly because Raven had abruptly left his side to clap Hank on the back a few times in that way that tried to show thanks without emotions. The flash of white teeth belied her poor attempt at a solder’s stoicism; there was more of Charles’s little sister still inside her than she liked to admit. But today Charles’s safety was Erik’s first priority too, and Raven’s protective instincts were an asset.

As she went to marshal their motley crew into something like marching order, Erik registered that Hank was still hovering close by, clearly about to ask how he was feeling again. So concerned, thinking of everyone before himself and Charles before that. Erik remembered his own reaction when Hank had said Charles wasn’t in any immediate danger, how close he had come to snarling something about how Hank didn’t exactly have a stellar track record when it came to identifying danger, did he, and historically his understanding of “safety” and “protecting Charles” had involved drug abuse and a decade of voluntary isolation. But this wasn’t the time to be unkind in that way; if there ever had been a time, it was ten years in the past. He couldn’t help that his gut instinct was to lash out in the service of an old grudge—a grudge more based in jealousy than he liked to admit—but he could master it.

“Thank you. For arranging that. It’s not something I would have thought of,” he said, to forestall Hank’s question and to smother a creeping sense of guilt.

Hank snorted with dry laughter. “No kidding. You’re of a much less forgiving school of conflict resolution.”

“It simplifies things,” Erik said.

“Nothing about this situation is simple,” Hank said grimly. “And it’s only going to get more complicated from here.”

He’d learned a lot about meaningful stares from Charles over the years, it seemed. This one made one corner of Erik’s mouth turn up. “You think I’ll make it worse. That I’m a loose cannon.”

“I _know_ you’re a loose cannon. I’m just wondering if we can point you in a direction that helps Charles or if you’re going to get us all killed.”

“I didn’t get any of you killed in Cairo, did I?”

“Not for lack of trying,” Hank pointed out.

Erik tilted his head in reluctant acknowledgment. It was difficult to argue with Hank when he kept being right about everything and seemed to have a much stronger grasp on the situation than Erik himself did, which had some troubling implications for their arguments decades ago that he elected not to consider now. He locked those doubts away behind titanium mental doors and welded them shut, just as he had thoughts of Magda and Nina. Auschwitz. What he had done in Cairo before his desperate attempt at last-minute redemption, which he still wasn’t convinced he had earned. A tremulous feeling somewhere critical told him that a breakdown was imminent but he shored up his mental and emotional defenses, determined to stave it off just a little while longer.

“No matter what you think of me it’s no good trying to drive me away,” he said. “I promised him I would come back to the mansion.”

“Trust me, Erik, I don’t doubt that you’ll go exactly where you want to.”

Unspoken: _You always have._ Under other circumstances that would have been incendiary, the spark to a raging argument with a fifty-percent chance of physical violence, but now Hank only sounded resigned and Erik couldn’t find it in himself to object; it was the truth, after all.

“This time I’m going with you,” he said.

Hank must have sensed how carefully he’d chosen those words, with their subtle implications. That Erik wouldn’t try to usurp his authority, that he’d cooperate with Hank even if he made no promises about the humans, that the megalomaniacal Magneto was nowhere in sight. For the moment, at least. The moment was all Erik could comprehend right now—he’d trust Hank with the long term.

“Works for me,” Hank said.

As a truce it could have been more eloquent, but it served, and it was all they had time for. Raven had shepherded the others across the room and rejoined them, nodding to Hank and giving Erik a doubtful up-and-down glance before apparently deciding he passed muster for basic mobility, no matter how awful he looked or felt.

“Tell Webster he’s got a deal and we’re ready when he is,” she said.

Erik practiced shuffling, painful steps across the room and back while Hank banged on the door and spoke to whoever opened it, and then for the fifteen-minute wait that followed. His head felt too light now instead of too heavy and every so often a wave of vertigo made him stumble, but he’d long since crafted a placid mask to disguise when he was in pain. Slipping it on was second nature. Aside from the tension in his body and a slight awkwardness of movement no one looking at him would know how close to collapse he still was.

Except Raven, who knew too much about masks herself to be fooled when others wore them, and kept him by her side when they were finally led out of the infirmary and down countless identical white hallways. Erik was lost immediately. Everything looked the same and after a few minutes he gave up on orienting himself by anything but the blue blur of Raven at his side and the brown blur that was Webster’s jacket up ahead.

“Erik,” Raven hissed.

He blinked. It took a few tries to clear his tunneling vision and another second to register the strangeness of the room he found himself in. Some kind of closed-circuit surveillance headquarters, with a wall of televisions stacked four high and five across, each showing a different image, and a bank of VCRs clicking away in the corner. His powers, which had instinctively begun to uncoil, brushed over an amount of metal that was nearly overwhelming after the deficit in the infirmary; even that split second of contact caused pain to flash white behind his eyes. He choked back a whimper, reined his mutation in again with a swift jerk. In other circumstances he would have gleefully fried every machine in the room, crippled the FBI’s entire surveillance system without the slightest effort or hesitation. But he’d promised Charles, he’d promised Hank, and he’d pushed his powers too far already. For the first time he wondered if it was possible to push them so far they never recovered, like a ruptured tendon that became a permanent limp.

“You’ll find the bottom right screen of interest,” Webster was saying as Erik breathed deeply and regained his composure.

“Charles,” Raven breathed.

The screen looked like a photograph at first. A white room, a hospital bed, a few monitors, and a small, still figure swallowed in blankets. But there was a chronometer at the top of the image, inexorably logging each passing second, and as their eyes adjusted they could see small movements. The rise and fall of a chest, lines zigzagging across a monitor.

“He’s unconscious, not sedated?” Hank said. Webster nodded. “And he’s been this way since Cairo?”

“No sign of regaining consciousness, but also no brain damage detectable to any traditional scans,” Webster answered. “Our neurologists—all highly qualified, I assure you—have recommended we let him sleep it off. Paraphrasing, of course.”

And what would happen, Erik wondered darkly, when Charles woke up and these neurologists suddenly had a disoriented, traumatized telepath on their hands? Somehow he doubted Johns Hopkins covered that on their syllabuses.

But Erik said nothing, because if they were very, very lucky no one had thought of that yet. If they saw Charles as simply another patient, if their focus was on containment and not control, he would be safer. He might even be able to protect himself when he woke up, at least long enough that they could get him out of here.

“He’s not in this building, is he?” Raven asked, watching the image with narrowed eyes. “Who has him? The CIA? The Pentagon? A black site?”

Webster smiled, affable and apologetic. “I admire your tenacity, but that really is classified. The most classified information in the country now that our nuclear secrets are worthless, I’d imagine.”

It was impossible to tell from Webster’s tone whether that was a tactless joke or a subtle warning. Either way Erik felt the sudden urge to punch the man in the face, and if the way Raven tensed beside him was any indication, he wasn’t the only one.

“If that’s all you can tell us then we’re done here,” she said instead, cold and final. “Thank you. If you could have someone show us the way out, we’d like to hold up our side of this deal as soon as possible.”

“Certainly. And we’ll be in touch, of course.”

It was easy to fade out after that, let the platitudes wash over him and focus instead on the bald man in the bed, surely too small and fragile-looking to be Charles. He looked like a child or a doll, not the most powerful telepath on the planet, capable of defeating a god. Seeing him on a screen wasn’t much of a comfort after all—Erik needed to be in that white room with him, reassure himself firsthand with sight and touch that Charles was alive and would stay that way. Like this he could slip away at any time, or be taken away like everything else had, and how would they know? The helplessness that rose in Erik’s throat was familiar like the sickness from before, thick and bitter with self-recrimination.

But it wasn’t until he stepped outside FBI Headquarters into the flashing lights of hundreds of news cameras that Erik, blinded and disoriented, truly understood how completely things had already spiraled out of control.


	7. Now

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charles finally appears! _So much_ pseudoscience. seriously i googled faraday cage for like half a minute, keep your expectations low.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can you tell from this chapter that my writing mantra is a quote from the 2009 _Sherlock Holmes_ movie ("You must widen your gaze")?

The first sign that something was different came at the third security checkpoint. The first checkpoint was standard for all Pentagon visitors, the second was unique to E Ring, and the third was at the bank of elevators that would take them down to the cell, hundreds of meters below ground. They’d already surrendered their belongings to the usual holding area and received itemized receipts when Hank noticed the soldiers guarding the elevator weren’t wearing telepathy-proof helmets.

“You won’t need them down there either,” one of the guards said. He had a thick southern drawl and a crush on Moira that made him friendly. “They’ve got a new thingy on him, seems to be doing the job.”

“Ah. Thanks for the head’s up,” Moira said.

From the sharp look she sent Hank’s way he hadn’t quite managed to throw up a veneer of politeness in time to hide his sudden surge of anxiety and animosity. It hardly mattered; the guards hadn’t even noticed. They weren’t outright mutantphobic but they didn’t look him in the face like they did Moira. One of them had once made a joke about how they couldn’t read his expressions with his face like that, and he could be thinking anything. Then some crack about how the ladies liked a man of mystery, didn’t they, so he must be doing all right in that department at least. And what could he do but smile uncomfortably and move on? Their pride was the least important variable in this entire fucked up equation.

Fishing for information via small-talk was not Moira’s strength, but she made a valiant effort as they were escorted to the elevator and the guard’s key used to initiate it. “So that’s, um, an impressive amount of progress since our last visit. The suppressant technology was still in its trial stages a few weeks ago.”

“Still is, far as I know. This is the first day we’ve been instructed to leave helmets off. Emergency containment procedures in place, of course. No hiccups so far—the brain trust downstairs must be real pleased.”

She smiled encouragingly. “I’m sure they are. What are these emergency containment procedures?”

“Some special room. They been wrestling with it since he got here. A cage, or some such?” Then, trying to be reassuring, “But I’m sure it’s not as, uh, inhumane as it sounds.”

“Ah,” Moira said again, reverting back to cool professionalism while Hank tapped a fast, nervous rhythm against his custom-made suit with one claw. An awkward silence fell as they waited for the elevator to ascend and the guard tried to think of some way to steer the conversation that would let him ask Moira out. It had been months and he hadn’t found one yet—because one didn’t exist—but his clear continuing interest was cringe-worthy enough on its own. The elevator arrived just as he was clearing his throat.

“See you in a bit, ma’am,” he said instead as they stepped inside, keying in the destination.

As soon as the doors closed Hank let an explosive breath out between gritted teeth. He kept his jaw set and his expression calm so no one watching them over the security cameras could read his lips or body language, but from a few inches away his agitation was palpable. “They’ve got him in a modified Faraday cage. I was hoping they wouldn’t figure out that it could be done but it looks like at least one person here knows what they’re about. This could be bad.”

Moira hummed acknowledgment behind a similarly mild expression. The red eyes of the cameras on the ceiling blinked down at them intermittently, placidly. “I remember there was talk of those back when Mag—Erik was first captured back in ’64. The DOD thought if they could design one that completely blocked all electromagnetic energy from reaching him it could counteract his mutation.”

“And did it work?”

“I don’t know. They finished the cell down here before it was complete. I guess they finally found a use for it.”

“Modified to repel psionic instead of electromagnetic energy. And that’s on top of whatever suppressant technology they’ve cooked up.”

Moira squared her shoulders as the elevator eased to a smooth stop on an unmarked level. The door opened onto a labyrinth of white hallways and dozens of identical locked doors, with two clipboard-wielding scientists scurrying towards them to act as escorts. Even with security cameras everywhere, they’d never once been left alone in the Pentagon; there were escorts between wings, through the labs, to the bathrooms. Just before the two scientists came into hearing distance Moira turned to Hank, putting her back to the security cameras, and a fierce determination flared in her eyes as she said, “Brace yourself. We’ll get through this. We’ll get _him_ through this, whatever it is.”

Hank nodded. He understood where that security guard was coming from more and more often these days.

“How did you modify the cage’s construction to sense and block the electromagnetic energy in the brain instead of the surrounding area?” he asked as they were led around a disorienting number of corners towards the lab.

“That’s classified information,” one of the scientists said. Neither bothered to look away from their clipboards.

Moira shot Hank a long-suffering look, but gamely tried, “How long has he been wearing the suppression device? Have you seen any demonstrable mental or emotional side effects?”

“That’s classified information.”

Asking questions only to be told “that’s classified information” was as habitual as the check-in procedure by now. As frustrating, too.

From the very beginning Hank had asked to be apprised of and involved with what the government euphemistically called Charles’s “containment procedures.” On paper it was only logical; he knew more about telepathy than anyone but an actual telepath, Charles would cooperate more readily with him, Hank understood the technology; hell, he’d probably designed some of it. He had been rebuffed at every turn. Respectfully at first, but with increasing impatience as the weeks wore on. All his qualifications made no difference: they didn’t trust him and had that egomania unique to federal employees. No government scientist would admit to intellectual weakness, even if all their fumbling around meant projects ran overtime and over budget. And so what if they did? Everything the government did took longer than expected and there was always more money for projects like these.

Instead it had been made very clear that he and Moira were only allowed to interact with Charles in their capacity as his legal counsel. They had minimal security clearance, enough to be let in the building but not enough to ask any questions beyond those any lawyer would ask. The most they could do was commit every detail of the lab and its equipment to memory and reconstruct it later, puzzle out each item’s purpose and what effect it might be having on Charles.

They exchanged glances as they stepped side by side through the lab’s double doors. Took in the new setup, registering its components with forced dispassion.

The Faraday cage they could make sense of, given enough time. It was just that: four walls lined with fine mesh screens, the wheelchair parked in the middle. The mesh brightened when they entered the room—reacting to and dampening their natural psionic energy, presumably—and the bank of monitors to the structure’s right chirped brightly before the glow faded. It was a complex setup, but nothing Hank couldn’t deconstruct. The suppressant technology was something else.

Almost invisible, for one. Nothing more dramatic than a circlet around the back of Charles’s head, digging into but not penetrating the skin near both temples. The whole device was no thicker than Moira’s little finger, but some kind of metal casing hid its inner workings. It gleamed like a broken halo under the fluorescent lights. With kinder lighting Charles might not have looked so pallid and sickly, with that fragility that usually characterized terminal illness. His hair never had grown back, and the pale expanse of his naked scalp didn’t help. His eyes looked bigger than before, bluer and brighter, almost feverish.

“Doctors McCoy and MacTaggart,” he said affably. “It does roll off the tongue, doesn’t it?”

Moira recovered first. She took a seat at the table that had been set up in front of the cage, smiling warmly. “Don’t leave yourself off that list, Dr. Xavier.”

Charles smiled back. “Your hair looks lovely today, Moira. Those helmets ruined it every time. I always felt the strangest compulsion to apologize for that.”

“Oh, I never minded. It made getting ready in the morning so much easier.”

She recognized something in his expression, deeper than the cheery half-smile he still wore—she’d seen similar on the faces of starving POWs when they were fed for the first time after their rescue. Charles craved familiar faces and friendly conversation with an almost physical hunger. He’d never known social and emotional deprivation like this and it had confused him at first, the newness and unpleasantness of it, but now, weeks and half a dozen visits later, Moira had watched as the confusion deteriorated into desperation. Charles was surrounded by doctors and soldiers who had been ordered not to interact with him, who thought of him as a mission or a subject of study or, if they thought of him as a person at all, as a genetic freak and a traitor to the country they served.

And Charles didn’t have Erik’s hardness, or the anger that had sustained him. Even if the hateful thoughts were blocked by telepathy-proof helmets, Charles’s empathy was off the charts. He knew without a word, much less a thought, when he was hated.

And now total suppression of his mutation on top of that. All that power trapped in his own head, too much to bear and an empty echo chamber at the same time. Small wonder he looked sick. Moira looked at Hank, who had taken the seat next to her, and saw the same train of thought conclude for him. Suddenly the light banter felt wrong, almost obscene. The Faraday cage wasn’t a puzzle to be solved but just a cage, hardly bigger than the ones for large dogs at kennels or animal shelters.

“They said it was your first day with that,” she said.

“This particular iteration, yes.” Charles began to raise a hand to the suppressor, thought better of it. As their eyes adjusted to the mesh and the odd lighting they could see the skin at his temples was red and irritated where the device touched it. “I’m guessing from your reactions that no one informed you they’d come so far with the suppression technology.”

Moira shook her head. “Not a word about it.”

“How surprising,” Charles said in a tone of voice that indicated the exact opposite. “It would seem like pertinent information for my defense counsel to have, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh, they’ll be getting that same question. From me if they’re lucky and Erik if they’re not.”

“You said _this particular iteration,_ ” Hank interrupted before more than a hint of a smile could cross Charles’s face, the way it always did when Erik’s overprotective streak was mentioned.

“You know creating new technology involves a certain amount of trial and error, Hank. Odds were never that they would get it right on the first try so, yes, there have been a number of prototypes. This is the first that’s lasted for more than a few hours. Everyone was quite pleased.”

“Why did the others only last a few hours?” Moira asked suspiciously.

“No one reason. Initially they had trouble compensating for the strength of my telepathy. The device was simply inadequate. Then a few attempts where the hardware itself malfunctioned—wires sparked, circuits broke, components lost cohesion, and so on—and after that a few that worked but had side effects that would have prevented me from taking the stand. Simple dizziness and confusion, in most cases, but sufficiently problematic to warrant further attempts.”

Charles sounded nonchalant, almost bored, but Hank had started enough fires in his own lab to know that when wires sparked and circuits broke suddenly there was the potential for flames or an explosion, and when a component lost cohesion it had either fallen apart or melted. None of which was ideal under any circumstances, but especially not when the device in question was attached to someone’s head. He had a feeling the red spots on Charles’s temples weren’t the only marks he’d received over the course of what sounded suspiciously like experiments. But that was something to take to Webster and the higher-ups; there wasn’t time now for anything but the most pressing questions.

Like, for instance, whether the thing on Charles’s head was in the process of liquefying his brain. Hank leaned forward, gesturing at the suppressor. “And what about the side effects of this one?”

“Bit of a headache, some disorientation,” Charles admitted, in what was probably a gross understatement. “Having my powers cut off like this is…like nothing I’ve ever experienced.”

For Moira and anyone other observers, it was a simple statement, but Hank caught the subtler meaning just as Charles had intended him to. No one in the government knew there was a serum that could inhibit mutations and it was imperative now more than ever that they never find out. By referencing it so obliquely Charles told Hank to eliminate all those side effects he’d experienced on the serum as well as informed him that the two were nothing alike, for all they shared a function. Even now, when he looked like death warmed over, Charles kept his wits about him.

Hank nodded to show he’d understood, phrased his response just as carefully. “What makes it unique?”

“There’s a sense of…claustrophobia, in a non-spatial way. I will admit I found it almost comforting at first—after the vastness I felt in Cairo I was afraid I might never find my way back into my own head. The quiet of it, after all that clamoring, was quite welcome.” Charles’s forehead wrinkled and his eyes drifted around the room, as if the right words eluded him. There was something unfocused about him for a moment, almost an absence, before he snapped back to attention, blinked, and continued. “But over time all those telepathy-proof helmets, and now the various suppression devices, have become more suffocating than comforting. I never realized how loud silence could be.”

“You’ve had no telepathic contact with anyone since you woke up after Cairo? At all?” Moira said.

“Trust in me isn’t exactly in large supply around here, Moira, as you may have noticed. I believe they’re convinced I’ll scramble their brains like eggs, given the chance.”

“They don’t know you very well.”

“They don’t know me at all,” Charles corrected, “but that doesn’t seem to bother them. It’s sweet that it bothers you, however.”

Moira’s hands twitched before she laced her fingers together in her lap and forcibly held herself back from doing something rash, like approaching the cage or saying something inexcusably emotional or foolish. There was always that impulse: the rush of angry helplessness, the spark of rage at the injustice of it. All the resentment she had felt towards him when he’d returned her stolen memories had faded; the violation was still there, but he needed her help more than she needed to hold a grudge. Now she wanted to take his hand and give him some minimum of physical contact, like that could make up for the total telepathic isolation, or make promises she couldn’t possibly keep. _It’ll be okay. We’ll get you out of here. This will all be over soon. They’ll realize how wrong they were._ But physical contact was prohibited and she couldn’t bring herself to lie to him, even now, when he looked more worn down than they’d ever seen him.

Time always seemed to speed up during these too-brief meetings, even more than it slowed down between them, in those long temporal spaces filled with worry between visits. There was too much to say. They had business to conduct, the minutiae of the upcoming trial to coordinate, and Charles had an endless slew of questions besides. He wanted to hear about life at the mansion. He wanted to know how Erik was doing, and Raven. He wanted to know what was happening in the world—his selection of reading material was abysmal, he said, nothing but old issues of _Time_ and _Life_ magazines _,_ and all his requests for a better selection had been passed on to higher-ups and never mentioned again. Moira and Hank were forced, again and again, to direct the conversation back to subjects Charles clearly wished he could avoid. How he was being treated here. Apocalypse’s violation of his physical and psychological autonomy in Cairo and, more importantly, in Westchester when he’d set off the missiles. A witness list that kept growing, featuring everyone from prominent Egyptologists to Charles’s maths tutor at Oxford.

“Not the man from Princeton,” Charles said towards the end of the visit, after another long moment of thought. He was tiring more quickly than usual today. “Not yet, anyway. Let’s avoid the psychiatrists as long as we can. It evokes certain preconceived notions about sanity and clear judgment, don’t you think? I’d just as soon not put those doubts in a judge’s head if we don’t have to.”

“Okay, we’ll put that conversation on hold,” Hank agreed easily, making a mental note to talk to Erik when they got home about taking moral stands when the death penalty was still on the table. He’d done his research when all this began on the few similar cases that existed in the history of the American court system, and he’d pick Ezra Pound’s fate for Charles over the Rosenbergs’ without a moment of hesitation.

The blaring siren that went off to signify that their time was up startled them every time, though Charles’s wince today was unusually pronounced; he’d been rubbing his forehead and when he flinched at the noise his fingers brushed the suppressor. At the contact a full-body shudder went through him and he made a soft grunt of pain between clenched teeth. If Hank’s mutation hadn’t given him enhanced eyesight he would have missed the slight residual trembling in Charles’s hands, but he didn’t draw Moira’s attention to it. Charles knew damn well his hands were shaking and wouldn’t appreciate his weakness being pointed out when there was nothing any of them could do about it.

There was also nothing the scientists with clipboards cared to do about it, from their blasé reaction when Hank mentioned it to them afterwards. He spoke with them quietly in the back of the room as Moira said her goodbyes and Charles forced a smile that wouldn’t stick.

“Constant trembling in the extremities could be an indication of permanent neurological damage,” Hank whispered. “What’s the outer limit for him wearing that device?”

But he knew the answer already.

“That’s classified information, sir.”

There was nothing for it, so Hank held his tongue after that. He kept his thoughts to himself as they were escorted out of the building, as Moira burst into an impressive string of Scottish curses as soon as they hit the parking lot, and as they barely managed to make the last train home to Westchester. He let it all churn in his head, every painful detail of that visit and all the others before it, the symptoms that could signify catastrophic damage to his mentor, the emotions that fought for dominance of his overall perception: concern, anger, fear, outrage, and a growing sensation that could only be described as _no._ Moira, eventually exhausted by her own anger, fell asleep with her head on his shoulder. As they continued north the inky darkness outside the train’s windows was broken intermittently by the neon and industrial lights of Philadelphia, Wilmington, Trenton. By Newark, his immediate emotional reaction had simmered down too and his thoughts had resumed ticking away in their usual rational (Raven would say robotic) way. Only the feeling of _no_ remained.

And it was that feeling that prompted him to greet Erik, who met them on the steps of the mansion at one in the morning, with:

“We need a Plan B.”

“I know,” Erik said. “How lucky for you that I’ve got one.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> can i get props for the ezra pound reference thaaaanks :)


	8. Then

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dadneto. Plot Things. Raven takes a bath, schemes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took _forever_ to write; it's a little bit longer, as an apology, I guess?

“You’ve got to tell him,” Raven said, standing in the doorway with her arms folded.

Peter, who’d had his face pressed close to the window overlooking the front lawn, jumped so violently that he smacked his forehead against the glass. He turned around, rubbing the red skin over the point of impact, scowling half-heartedly.

“Jeez, boss. Warn a guy, would you?”

She raised an eyebrow. “What have I told all of you about ambushes?”

“To expect them? But I thought you meant like, military, not conversational.”

Raven managed to keep her expression stern and her reluctant fondness tucked out of sight. Peter was a good kid. For a guy who’d grown up with an alcoholic mom, an absentee dad, and a shitty stepdad, he was well-adjusted and level-headed. His defense mechanisms—sarcasm and mild kleptomania—were ingrained but not ineradicable. The adults in the mansion were having slow-motion nervous breakdowns and the kids didn’t know what was happening and Peter, it turned out, was the only one Raven could rely upon to not be a raw bundle of exposed nerves at any given second. She would have liked him even if he hadn’t been Erik’s.

But he was, and that was the problem.

“You’ve gotta tell him,” she said again.

She crossed to the window and stood next to him. Together they looked out at the lawn. Immense strips of plywood twice Raven’s size drifted toward them, then up to affix themselves to the second floor timber framing. A small whirlwind of screws, nuts, and bolts followed. There was a soft drumming sound from above them, like summer rain on a tin roof, as the metal bore into the wood and the skeleton of the second floor slowly came together. The sun was setting and the source of all the activity was almost invisible by now. Two tiny black dots fifty feet off the ground. Closer up she’d be able to see their extended arms and matching flannel shirts but right now Jean and Erik were so small she could block them from her sight with the tip of one finger.

Peter sighed.

“I didn’t want it to happen like this,” he mumbled. “That was the whole point of not saying anything in Cairo. I didn’t want to be just one more thing he had to deal with in a crisis.”

Raven did Peter the courtesy of looking away as he struggled with the knowledge that the most important conversation of his life wasn’t going to go at all the way he hoped. After a few beats of silence, she put her hand on his shoulder, squeezed gently, then let go. He took a deep breath with a shakiness behind it that she didn’t mention either.

“I guess we’re kind of in crisis mode for the foreseeable future, right?” he said.

“Fair guess.”

“So if there’s never going to be a good time, no time like the present, that’s the idea?”

“Something like that.” She could have stopped there, but Peter wasn’t one of the kids, was he, and she had too few people she could trust to overlook the one right next to her. “Look, Peter, a lot of what we do from now on is going to involve keeping secrets from people. Even people we think are on our side. We can’t afford to keep them from each other too. We’ve got to present a united front to the world, and that means everyone’s on the same page.”

“You think it could be used against us? Him being my dad?”

“I don’t know,” Raven said. She had thought about that too. “I don’t think we should hold a press conference about it, if that’s what you mean. But you do need to tell him before some journalist figures it out and he finds out from the evening news or the front page.”

Peter cringed. “I hadn’t thought of that. Fuck, he’d flip.”

“Yeah. So suck it up and break it to him as gently as you can, okay? He’s had enough surprises lately.”

“No chance I could get you to look like me and do it instead?” Peter said. He made an effort to sound lighthearted, but Raven had that shapeshifter’s gift for reading body language and tone of voice, and she knew he was only half joking.

“Cold day in hell, buddy,” she said unapologetically. “Sun’s going down. They’ll be done for the day soon. I’d tell him after dinner, if I were you. Get it over with.”

Not that she blamed him for his trepidation, really; Erik had never been the easiest person to get along with, but he’d been a barrel of laughs before compared to his behavior in the weeks since Cairo. For a few days in the beginning she’d gone to sleep each night convinced she’d wake up to headlines about Magneto breaking Charles Xavier out of federal custody, even with all those sacred promises Erik had made and restructured his existence around. Whether she imagined that he succeeded and was rebranded a terrorist as the two of them vanished into thin air or was killed in the attempt depended on how unhinged Erik had been acting that day. There were days when he had a full breakfast for the entire household prepared by 8 a.m. and days when he didn’t leave his room at all until the sun had set and she couldn’t for the life of her figure out what triggered one kind over the other. She’d never seen him in tears but his eyes were red and swollen all the time, so either he was crying or not sleeping or both. If he’d been quiet before he was downright sullen now and there was a desolation in his eyes sometimes that made her selfishly glad she wasn’t the telepath in the family.

But through it all he’d stayed. And he’d calmed down a little since the reconstruction had begun. He always had found using his mutation therapeutic, especially for manual labor. Rebuilding the mansion was the best thing for him, which was fortunate for the rest of them since a good 80% of it had been unlivable upon their return. A few rush orders of construction materials and some hushed conversation between Erik and Jean that neither ever mentioned again later, the first floor was rebuilt and the second in progress.

They took little victories, these days.

Raven was halfway out the door when Peter spoke up one more time. He sounded different…older, maybe.

“Hey, boss? Do I need to worry about my mom, with all this?”

She didn’t stop walking or look back at him, just called over her shoulder. “Worry about yourself, Peter.”

Charles would have handled that differently, she mused as she headed for the gym. It was a too-common thought. Charles would have said the right things, about how family meant everything to Erik and even in less-than-ideal circumstances he would accept Peter and things might be rocky at first but he’d come around. Then something about not taking it personally—most of the things Erik did were about Erik, not the other person. And Charles would have reminded Peter that his mom was strong and she’d be perfectly safe—she’d survived Erik, so the U.S. government would be a cinch, wouldn’t it.

Raven didn’t have the time or the temperament for that. Maybe she had twenty years ago, before everything went to shit and it turned out mutantkind needed soldiers, not mothers or therapists. So she’d made herself into a soldier, a tactician, a strategist, and in dire circumstances a general.

Fortunately, that was exactly what they needed right now.

“I need the X-Men,” she’d told Hank in the beginning. “They’re mine now. We’ll rebuild the Danger Room first, I’ll keep them off the front lawn, and our first mission is not going to be ‘rescue Charles’ so keep your hat on, but these kids need to be battle-ready like, yesterday.”

“They _were_ battle-ready yesterday,” Hank had said, because the day before had been Cairo.

Raven had grinned a little at that, her first smile in days. “Fair point. But they need to be ready to fight _together._ As a cohesive unit, all their powers supporting each other. And they need to be able to anticipate new weapons that I know more about than anyone. We’re not dealing with other mutants—or traditional artillery—anymore.”

Hank had objected less than usual to the implication that violence was inevitable. It wasn’t that he doubted some kind of armed conflict was probable; he just didn’t think they’d be the ones to start it. Where Raven worried about Erik changing his mind and descending on whoever had Charles, Hank worried about whoever had Charles changing their minds and descending on the mansion. He—and the school—had been hiding in plain sight for so long that the heightened visibility of what had been a safe haven didn’t sit well with him. They were sitting ducks with targets on their backs, he argued, agitated enough to mix his metaphors. And he didn’t trust the government not to regret letting them go in the first place. With the entire world watching and grateful to the mutants who had stopped the apocalypse, Webster had bowed to public pressure initially but that didn’t mean a strike team wouldn’t arrive some night when the newspapers weren’t looking.

That was the one positive side effect of the hundred-odd journalists who’d been camped outside the mansion’s gates for two weeks now.

Fucking cockroaches, Raven thought when she passed by a front window later that evening. She could see their trucks and tents and lights even from here, though the drive was unnecessarily long. It made everyone in the mansion anxious, knowing they were being watched all the time. Erik in particular hated being treated like a specimen after ten years in prison, though he’d healed enough in the decade since that the trauma manifested as nightmares and not sudden structural damage to the house.

“I can make it so they can’t see us,” Jean had offered at first, once she had recovered enough that using her mutation no longer gave her blinding headaches.

“You mean you can alter their perception so they don’t realize they’re seeing us?” Hank had said, ever a stickler for accuracy.

Moira had frowned. “Can you also alter the perception of technology? Because their cameras can see us even if they can’t.”

“Not if they’re mysteriously broken,” Erik had pointed out. It was the most he’d spoken all day.

“No offense, Erik, but when metal things break around you it’s not that much of a mystery anymore.” Raven had hoped he’d crack something at least resembling a smile at that, but he’d remained stone-faced. No choice but to continue. “No, we have to go about this carefully. If they don’t see us but we show up in pictures, they’ll know we’ve used our mutations against them. If their equipment malfunctions, same deal. Either way we look bad. How do we come out of this without journalists crawling up our asses _and_ looking good?”

Silence.

Until Moira raised her head, eyes flickering back and forth like she was reading the idea in midair. Slowly she had said, “You know what looks really good? The girl who saved the world and the rehabilitated terrorist using their powers to create something, not destroy it. Rebuilding a school, for instance. That’s a front-page photo or a magazine cover that humanizes us _and_ portrays mutations in a positive light.”

“What,” Erik had said flatly, in a tone of voice that meant _no._

“You mean let them see us,” Raven had translated. “And not just _let_ them but…encourage them? Moira, you’re talking about a photoshoot.”

“Exactly.” A pause, and then the pronouncement that changed everything: “I think we’ve been going about this the wrong way.”

Which was how, two weeks later, Raven could call the journalists camping outside the gate cockroaches and simultaneously know all their names and bureaus and angles. Moira’s epiphany was also the reason there was a _New York Times_ front page taped to the refrigerator door. The article itself was only a single column above the fold with a short headline (“Learning Opportunities”) but the picture was more eloquent than words: an action shot of Erik and Jean hovering in midair, piles of construction materials laid out neatly below them, with new bearing partitions and drywall visible in the background of what would be the new East Wing. Raven herself was in the very bottom corner of the picture, poring over blueprints laid out on a stack of plywood. None of their expressions were visible—fortunate, since Erik had been especially unpleasant that day, in an _I’m here, aren’t I, what more do you want_ kind of way—but it was a positive image, and a reminder of what happened when the media was on their side.

A reminder of what happened when it was set against them was taped on the fridge below that. The picture showed them shoving through the crowd outside the FBI building, wincing away from the cameras and looking an unflattering combination of angry and exhausted, and the headline read “Mutants Go Free After Devastation in Cairo, Questions Remain.”

They’d learned a lot since then.

It was nearly normal now, this uneasy coexistence, as much as any of this could be. Raven stuck with her routine for the rest of the day. A short workout before dinner, spaghetti and meatballs eaten in the small kitchen instead of the large dining room with chatty teenagers, touching base with Hank in the lab he was slowly piecing back together. She preferred to watch tapes of the evening news programs late at night rather than as they aired at 7 p.m.; it was easier to focus on the details when she was alone and could rewind if necessary. Charles was mentioned so often that she’d taken to watching with a notepad and paper beside her in case she needed to write down any new developments or ideas during the broadcasts.

But first a bath, she thought.

If she hadn’t been leaning over the tub in physical contact with the hot water faucet, she probably would have missed the faint tremor in the pipes. It was short-lived, only a few seconds, but definite, accompanied by the low groan of metal shaking and then settling again. Though she couldn’t be sure, Raven was willing to bet the same phenomenon had just occurred throughout the entire plumbing system of the mansion, not only in her bathroom.

She was also willing to bet that Peter had just taken her advice.

So much for a quiet evening. Well, at least she had some warning. Deliberately she filled the tub and added some lavender flakes and then bubbles, just for the hell of it. Paused, staring into the steaming water. Then she went back into her room, took out the bottle of Highland Park she kept in the bedside table, and set it next to the bathtub before she got in.

She’d been soaking for half an hour when Erik barged in. Once the sight of her naked in a tub would have given him pause; now he didn’t even seem to notice. The bathroom door swung closed and locked itself and he stood there, looking strangely lost.

“I have a son,” he said, like the words tasted funny. Then again, as if trying to convince himself: “I have a son.”

“Do you now,” Raven dead-panned. She’d pondered feigning surprise, decided there was no point in lying about it—Erik was literally the last one to know that he was Peter’s father. If he chose to find that upsetting, which frankly wouldn’t surprise her, that was on him. She gestured between the closed lid of the toilet and the whiskey and Erik took the hint, sitting and taking such a huge swig that it gave him a coughing fit.

“Hey, that’s good stuff.”

“I need it,” Erik said, wiping his dripping chin off on his sleeve. He was quiet for a moment. Calmer than Raven had expected, too. She wondered if he was in some kind of shock. After another sip: “I hadn’t thought of Magda Maximoff in…almost thirty years.”

“Things were that good, huh?”

“I only knew her a few days. She got me out of a scrape, gave me a place to lie low while things settled down. We passed the time in the…usual ways. I was gone long before she would have known anything came of it.”

“‘Anything’ being the twenty-five-year-old in the kitchen.”

“Well.” He rubbed his forehead, shifted restlessly. “We were both so young. She lived in a cramped one-room apartment above a bar, no heating or air conditioning. It must have been hell for her, raising him on her own.”

It had been. Raven had done some checking. Magda Maximoff had married and eventually divorced an abusive man who hadn’t even bothered to arrange visitation rights with their daughter; she’d gone back to school for a little under a year before dropping out and taking up heavy drinking instead. But her unhappiness wasn’t Erik’s business. She was tough and didn’t need his pity, so Raven said only, “She seems to have done all right. He’s a good kid.”

“He’s a good man,” Erik corrected. “Twenty-five years old, perfect control over his mutation, knows his own mind. All those things fathers are supposed to do, that I was ready to do, he’s already mastered. I don’t know what he wants from me. There’s nothing I can give him.”

“But if you did know—if there was something—you’d give it to him, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course,” Erik said, like there was no other answer.

“Then start there.”

She could see the muscles in his jaw jump as he clenched his teeth, face tightening with that aching desolation that she knew meant he was thinking of his wife and daughter. Sitting as close together and quiet as they were, it hit her suddenly that he’d lost more weight over the past few weeks and fidgeted now, wringing his hands in a way she thought no one did outside of Victorian romances. And along with those observations came another: Erik had no problem with who Peter was, but he couldn’t bear who Peter wasn’t. His thoughts of himself as a father were inextricably entwined with memories of Nina. Any other associations felt like a betrayal of her.

“I don’t want to start there _._ I don’t want to _start_ anywhere,” he said quietly, confirming her suspicions. “I’m not new to this. I’ve been a father for seven years and that doesn’t change just because my child is gone.”

“I know that. And Erik, so does Peter. He’d never dream of replacing Nina. And you’re right—he doesn’t _need_ you in his life, but he wants you there.” She sat forward in the cooling water, forced him to look her in the eye. “Please, just give him a chance. See him as himself.”

Erik nodded—understanding her words, she thought, not agreeing with them—and his mouth twisted in a humorless smile. “It’s surreal. I’ve had more families than most and every one of them has been torn apart. And I’ve never been able to stop it.”

“You wouldn’t have acted the way you did in Cairo if you didn’t believe there was at least some chance that would change.”

“Not without Charles. None of it works without Charles.”

Raven sat back in the bathtub with a splash that echoed off the walls and sent water droplets in every direction. A few made it as far as Erik’s clothes and he gave her the peevish look of a damp cat before deliberately scooting as far away as the closed toilet seat would allow, which wasn’t far. Raven closed her eyes, resisted the urge to glare back. She wasn’t even angry—more frustrated, really, that the two of them were so hopelessly entangled in each other’s lives and yet so completely incapable of compromise outside of literal worst case scenarios. Erik had given Charles his anger, his devastation, his pain, but these soft words of hope he kept to himself or saved for Raven, who didn’t need them or deserve them the way Charles did. They were a fucking Shakespearean tragedy, her brother and her—whatever Erik was.

“We’ll get him back,” she promised, opening her eyes.

“How?” Erik said. Clearly he didn’t expect an answer.

Raven didn’t think she had one. None of them had, so far. The most they could do was show themselves, mutantkind, and by extension Charles in the best light possible, get public opinion on their side whenever they could, and brace for the government’s next move. Last they’d heard half a dozen intelligence agencies were scheduled to meet with the Department of Justice, though why the hell the DOJ was getting involved was more than Moira or any of her contacts inside the government could say. All they knew for sure was that it didn’t bode well.

_You know what looks good?_

_The rehabilitated terrorist._

Raven narrowed her eyes and looked at Erik speculatively, trying to see him as a stranger would. He’d shed the mantle of Magneto entirely, wardrobe and affect. He wore a black turtleneck and jeans, the beginnings of a scruffy beard, ginger hair just long enough to curl at the back of his neck. He looked tired and grief-stricken and the weight loss had sharpened his cheekbones and made his eyes look brighter, more blue than gray. Handsome and photogenic as long as he kept his mouth shut—or said exactly the right things, the kind of things he’d say to her but never Charles.

It had worked once…

“I think we need to call a press conference,” she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In good news, the timelines are coming together next, feat. hurt!Charles and reluctant America's Next Top Mutant!Erik
> 
> also sorry i haven't responded to comments yet--I will definitely do that over the next few days bc they really do mean everything. nothing helps the inspiration like validation from internet strangers :)


	9. Interlude: Then and Now

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To join the timelines: Erik's first and last interview before shit gets real
> 
> (this is not his plan B, that would be so boring. i guess his plan B is more like plan C. i figured he would make one last attempt to do things the legal way before erik!logic kicked in)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Erik is the most awkward interviewee ever, but learns how to utilize his media darling status _super_ fast
> 
> aka i got bored with my own writing style and decided to throw some pastiche in there for variation.

“The Man Behind Magneto”

_Bob Woodward,_ The Washington Post

_November 17, 1983_

_The entire world recognizes his name and face, but there are only a handful left alive who can claim to truly know Erik Lehnsherr. The man is an enigma. The persona of Magneto overshadows him—the helmet, the cape, the public promotion of a mutant supremacist agenda that never shied away from using violence to achieve its goals._

_In the 1960s and 70s, Magneto was a lightning rod for mutant rights, a call to arms. He communicated through inspiring speeches and intimidating exhibitions of his metallokinesis. His trial in 1964 for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which anonymous sources with knowledge of the case have since admitted was rigged against him from the start, made him a martyr in his followers’ eyes. After his escape from prison and involvement in the events surrounding the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, the general public and defense agencies worldwide feared that Magneto would resume leadership of the Brotherhood, which remains on a watchlist of terrorist organizations to this day despite years of inactivity._

_Instead he vanished._

_He reappeared last month in Poland, New York, and Cairo at the side of the mutant now known as Apocalypse. Though much about the ensuing conflict remains unclear or highly classified, it has been established that Magneto began the battle at Apocalypse’s side, caused incalculable damage around the globe, but also played a decisive role in his defeat._

_That seemingly uncharacteristic change of heart, confirmed by CIA agent Moira MacTaggart when portions of her official debriefing were released to the public last week, paved the way for another role reversal. In the aftermath of Cairo, government officials and public opinion forgave Magneto his terrorist past. They praised his willingness to save humanity from extinction by a fellow mutant whose beliefs were not so different from the ones he’d espoused over the years himself. And Charles Xavier, once named Time’s Man of the Year for his work on mutant-human integration, took his place as the most feared mutant in the United States. In the absence of a nuclear weapons stockpile, Xavier is also the FBI’s number-one threat to public safety._

_But the question remains: no longer demonized, has Magneto hung up his cape for good? And who is Erik Lehnsherr without him?_

_There was certainly little of the militant mutant supremacist in evidence during a recent visit to Westchester, New York, where Lehnsherr is currently occupied overseeing the reconstruction of the Xavier Institute. The iconic helmet and cape were gone. He wore jeans and a flannel shirt and looked like any construction worker. With a haircut and a shave, he would still have those square-jawed old Hollywood looks that made him such an effective face of mutant rights. The years have aged him more than most but in the eyes—confused, hurt, some might even say haunted—he still bears an uncanny resemblance to that infamous mug shot from February 2, 1964. He went to prison for a decade not long after it was taken._

_Lehnsherr, whose handshake is as firm as his manner is subdued, was initially reluctant to talk about that period._

_“It’s not very interesting. I learned to meditate. I had to do something to keep my head on straight,” he said, dismissive of the subject yet clearly choosing every word with care._

_He refused to elaborate._

_Instead he offered a tour around the property, straightforward to the point of brusqueness as he explained the work still left to do, the new additions, the improvements he’d made by using firm, lightweight metal instead of the hand-hewn oak beams the original builders had imported from Bavaria in the early 19 th century. He seemed especially proud of the four elevator shafts that will allow easy, fast access to any corner of the mansion._

_The unavoidable observation was that Lehnsherr is building a home for a man who doesn’t live there. With recent developments in the case, including an indictment on charges of treason that haven’t been leveled against an American citizen since Tomoya Kawakita in 1952, Charles Xavier might not be home for a long time. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger confirmed earlier this week that Xavier has been transferred to the secure cell underneath the Pentagon where Lehnsherr himself spent five years. Weinberger reassured the public that Xavier’s telepathy poses no danger to the national security advisors working above him or civilians in the DC-Metro area, though he declined to specify the measures taken to achieve that safety._

_“What is happening to Charles Xavier now is a gross miscarriage of justice,” said Lehnsherr, with the deliberateness of someone reading a prepared statement. But his stoicism only lasted a moment. “Humans don’t understand how our mutations shape our perception of the world, how having them taken away is…worse than a physical injury. I’ve had my share of both and I’d take a broken bone every time._

_“Charles is a teacher, not a traitor. He couldn’t control what happened then any more than he can control what’s happening now. Such repeated violations—it’s unconscionable. The cowards calling for his head now wouldn’t even be alive without him. He’s a better man than any of them.”_

_Many of Lehnsherr’s answers had a similarly disjointed rhythm. Each careful beginning was derailed by his natural impulsiveness and habit of—well, in any other man it might be considered “fretting,” but Lehnsherr’s gravitas occludes such banal behavior. But he did seem fixated on Xavier’s imprisonment and health, an odd obsession considering the two of them spent a large percentage of the past two decades publicly at each other’s throats. In a 1963_ New York Times _editorial, Xavier called Lehnsherr “no more than a terrorist, intolerant and short-sighted, and the last man who should be associated with the important struggle for mutant rights in this country.”_

_Lehnsherr—or rather, Magneto—responded with scathing articles of his own, some written from prison, condemning Xavier as a coward and his school as a utopian fantasy bound for failure. His televised speeches, including his most famous from the White House lawn, advocated aggression over education. He seemed willing, even eager, to start the inevitable conflict if no one else would._

_The bitter irony of their current situation has not escaped Lehnsherr: he almost singlehandedly rebuilt a school he once derided while Xavier is imprisoned for a crime so unthinkable and grandiose in scale that it puts all Magneto’s work to shame._

_But Lehnsherr maintains Xavier’s innocence as he once maintained his own._

_“It’s strange, isn’t it, that I’m here, and he’s the one in jail for something he didn’t do. But mutantkind, mutant children especially, need the Xavier Institute more than ever before. They need to know that if they don’t understand their powers yet, or if their control isn’t quite perfect, they can come here and find help and understanding. Not be punished because they scare themselves or others.”_

_It was a clear—though not particularly subtle—segue into his defense of Xavier, which was based on agency. He insisted that in the moment the telepath had none and should therefore bear no responsibility for the usage of his powers._

_“The commands to release the missiles came from him,” admitted Lehnsherr. “But he couldn’t have resisted giving them any more than the officers could have resisted obeying them when they flipped those switches._

_“Charles was speaking to me—telepathically—when it happened. I felt En Sabah Nur reach through me and into Charles to take control of his powers. I felt Charles try to fight him off.” He spoke dispassionately, as if these events were unremarkable and not part of a deeply personal and traumatic experience. But after a pause, an evangelical fervor more suited to his helmeted alter-ego began to seep into his words. “The government doesn’t want to hear this but it needs to be said. I’ll say it before any congressional committee or federal judge with the courage to know the truth. People need to understand. If you forgive one of us for the cost of surviving and defeating En Sabah Nur, you have to forgive all of us. The cognitive dissonance required to blame only Charles is staggering. None of the men who physically launched the missiles have received the slightest reprimand—nor have the X-Men, nor have I. That Charles hasn’t received precisely the same treatment tells me that he’s not a criminal, he’s a scapegoat.”_

_Here was a similarity between Magneto and Erik Lehnsherr: neither seemed to have much faith in the American government. His suspicion of the the judicial system, especially when the case involved mutants, was obvious as well. But where Magneto’s distrust manifested in attacks on government facilities, on several occasions uncovering evidence that proved his paranoia at least partially justified, Lehnsherr’s current opinion seemed more based on personal experience than conspiracy theories._

_“They’ve given me no reason to trust them. Not in the ten years I spent enjoying their hospitality, and not any time before or since. Bolivar Trask was not an isolated incident.”_

_However, Lehnsherr acknowledged that he would be happy to proved wrong, and issued an invitation—or perhaps a challenge—to the prosecution’s counsel._

_“I have few regrets about the things I've done to protect my people—fewer than your readers would like, I'm sure. I won't repudiate my past actions. But if Charles Xavier is given the due process he deserves, free of the prejudices and hidden agendas that have characterized my own dealings with the United States government, I would gladly admit that my judgment was premature. I would welcome this case as a new beginning in mutant-human relations, as would Charles himself, if he were permitted to speak publicly.”_

_[continued on page A16]_

* * *

Judgment Day, Redux

_Hunter S. Thompson,_ Rolling Stone

_December 10, 1983_

_Erik Lehnsherr on the steps of the Xavier Institute, black turtleneck, arms crossed—the tiger who built his own gilded cage and stayed there. He prowls standing still and any man with a shred of self-preservation in him will gird his loins around this type…some lizard-brain impulse like a fear of the dark or other lurking things. But at 7 a.m. that slow, curling smile and the offer of coffee, when decidedly scattered and not a little pungent after the five-hour drive from Washington, DC—because when the boss calls at 1 a.m. on Sunday and says get to Westchester it only means one thing these days—was enough to send a different kind of shiver up the spine. He’s magnetic alright._

_King of the castle isn’t the half of it. Eyes bulging out of our heads, we watched Lehnsherr rebuild the Xavier Institute almost singlehandedly…his face has been on the cover of every magazine in the grocery store checkout aisle…but no Life photo gallery can capture the way he’s made this house his. It’s in the details. At every turn through labyrinthine halls—decorative bronze doorknobs, burnished sculptures and abstract art, wrought iron doors. A place with this much metal should feel hard and cold, unhospitable, but this modern Monti bucks all convention and he’s made an ever-growing handful of Gifted Youngsters a home, and himself a fortress._

_And maybe it was just a coincidence—maybe he was tired too—but there was a vibe about him as he poured two cups of black coffee that invited a double-take…something grounded, chill, almost Zen. Not a lick of that take no shit, ready to bust some balls, hackles up before the sun attitude that leaks through the pages of his carefully diplomatic interviews with the big-name rags. He talks about safety a lot in those pieces. The looseness in his shoulders, the easy way he used his mutation, spooning sugar and closing cabinets without touching them—if Lehnsherr feels safe anywhere, it has to be here._

_He pondered that for a bit. “Things always feel most comfortable when you build them yourself, don’t they? You know all the ins and outs that way, no surprises. There’s a sense of ownership. No denying the metal feels good too—I made sure we did it right, high quality everything. But Jean did just as much of the work and Raven gave us the original blueprints. I’m not much more than a glorified carpenter. Now I’m just minding the store till the owner gets back. Don’t misunderstand—they’re wonderful children, attentive students. I’m simply not cut out to be a teacher. Besides, no one but Charles Xavier should be running a school for mutant children, because no one but him ever has. He’s the sole expert in the field, you might say.”_

_It’s safe to say by now that an interview with Erik Lehnsherr is an interview about Charles Xavier. His onetime-rescuer, two-time-friend, three-time-nemesis…Lehnsherr talks like his life began when they met. Oh, sure, there’s some shady stuff about Nazi-hunting before that, nothing that surprises you to look at him but nothing he’d ever talk about the way he talks about the Professor._

_After Cairo he surprised everyone by coming back to this place. Most figured he’d disappear again like he did after the showdown with Nixon and Mystique in ’73. While the higher-ups and the papers sang his praises, no doubt a few sweat-soaked defense analysts worried he’d regret taking out the only mutant supremacist to ever make his own agenda look integrationist. Global apocalypse aside, Magneto missed a hell of an opportunity to reboot the Brotherhood…and who’s to say what would have happened, if Xavier hadn’t taken the rap for all of it? They always did hold each other in check. When the news came that the DOJ was serving up an indictment guaranteed to put Xavier’s head on the chopping block—an acceptable sacrificial lamb for a president in reelection campaign mode, whose own promises of safety all involved nuclear weapons, namely how many more we had than the other guy until nobody had any—Lehnsherr lashed out, in print and on the record. He tried TV too, a few carefully curated interviews with respected newsmen where he floundered, by turns too shy, too sharp, too pedantic, too vague._

_But if Cronkite could meet this guy! This early-morning coffee-swigging Lehnsherr with his wry humor and anecdotes about kids who walk through walls into other people’s showers by accident…this one knew his stuff._

_“In a way none of this is new. The American political system has been a corrupt, incestuous travesty for decades,” he mused. “Executive and judiciary and defense, back and forth, deals under the table we never knew about. I was gone for most of it in one way or another—the silver lining of an extended prison sentence and time abroad, I suppose.”_

_Lehnsherr agrees with that faction that sees the country’s been in a tailspin since Watergate…the Cold War is a political prop by now, so interminable it bores us…and where’s the danger now, with the nukes gone? Reagan insists still out there, only now with the Strategic Defense Initiative rendered useless he imagines Andropov salivating over biological weapons instead—neurotoxins and old G-series agents from WW2. The two of them probably still share wet dreams about the end of the world._

_Lehnsherr waved such paranoia away like a bad smell. “I understand the appeal of the familiar. Especially when it comes to national security—no one likes a surprise on that front. But instead of scrambling to recapture the status quo, reinvigorating that fear that’s driven politics and public opinion since the arms race began, Weinberger, Webster and his kind need to realize that there’s an opportunity here. Dropping the case against Charles Xavier would accomplish two objectives: reaffirm a commitment to mutant rights and recast the loss of the global nuclear arsenal in the light of reconciliation. Mutually assured destruction is no longer an inevitability. They should be giving Charles a Nobel Peace Prize.”_

_Polls show that somewhere between 20 and 30% of Americans agree with him but short of a miracle the DOJ is not going to drop Xavier’s case, which is set to begin later this month. His defense counsel is better off focusing on an exoneration and they know it. But they have another problem, one that made Lehnsherr look unsettled for the first time. The statement from Moira MacTaggart and Hank McCoy about it came out yesterday—the telepathic suppression device, the unknown number of trials and prototypes, the potential for lasting neurological damage and what happened to due process, anyway? Surely the public won’t stand for this._

_Except it looks like they will, now that Reagan’s made Xavier’s conviction a focal point of his campaign. Americans trust the president—this president in particular—more than they’ve ever trusted mutants, especially telepaths. Reagan’s not the brain trust Xavier seems to be but in this political and ideological climate that’s no bad thing…anti-intellectualism and evangelical everything are both on the rise and the smart ones like Xavier suffer for it. Decency says we should be outraged. If what’s happening to him now isn’t illegal it’s sure as hell immoral…and for reasons of national security there’s not a thing Lehnsherr can do about it. And he is, after all, the world’s foremost expert on long-term mutation suppression._

_“It’s like phantom-limb syndrome. You know it’s gone but you can still feel it,” he explained. “At first I couldn’t focus, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stand up straight. Eventually I learned that a few things helped—meditation, sleeping as much as I could, exercising to the point of exhaustion. I could function, just about. But mine’s only a physical mutation. Psychic mutations are infinitely more complex. Charles is going to have no idea what’s real. He’s going to be disoriented. Panic or catatonia are both real concerns. Imagine total sensory deprivation and you might have some sense of it. And he’s going to be expected to respond rationally and normally to a federal inquisition? He was already declared fit to stand trial but if that test was administered again today I’d bet this house the results would be different. They’ve set him up to fail. And it should outrage any American, any human, who prostrates themselves at the alter of freedom and democracy.”_

_If that’s true—and Lehnsherr’s gained a reputation for relentless honesty—Xavier’s in deeper trouble than any of us realized. And it may already be too late to do anything about it. Short of riots in the streets and marches on the DOJ there’s nothing that will convince the head honchos to pump the breaks on this case. Few are even sure who’s driving the bus these days…Weinberger, Webster, Reagan himself? (not likely)…and in the bedlam of it all it’s easy to forget that at the center of it there’s a teacher accused of a crime he was by all eyewitness accounts forced to commit, currently having his brains scrambled by mad scientists._

_That’s the thing about decency. We haven’t had it in a hell of a long time._

_[continued on page 49]_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lol how'd i do imitating woodward and thompson? my sources were _All the President's Men_ and for thompson more _Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail_ than _Generation of Swine_ bc lbr his 80s stuff was a little watered down. 
> 
> also responding to comments asap--thank you in advance everyone who left them!


	10. Opening Statements

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> you guys were so patient. have some cherik angst.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Consider this the beginning of part two.

It was the worst time to lose focus. The next day the papers would say that he was twitchy, easily distracted, untrustworthy. That fatal phrase: “didn’t inspire confidence.”

Charles took a deep breath. Forced himself to concentrate. Looked from Moira and Hank to the Honorable Lee Parsons Gagliardi and then back down at the typewritten page.

“—and over the coming weeks I will seek to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the use of my mutation that day was neither premeditated nor consensual and that I cannot therefore be held personally responsible for the loss of the global nuclear arsenal—”

His voice wasn’t entirely steady, his accent more pronounced than usual. He could hear his own fear and nerves radiated off him like a bad smell—how glaringly obvious must they be to the rest of the room?

A lightning-quick glance up to assess the audience’s reception of his words didn’t do much good. They were so silent, so still, expressions blank and unhelpful. His forehead wrinkled as he suppressed the urge to do something crazy and unexpected, to shock them all into proving they were real and not just particularly well-crafted mannequins. If he screamed, would they scream back? With no facial expressions, body language, or thoughts to read, how could he be sure this whole strange scenario wasn’t just a dream? Sometimes he wasn’t at all certain he ever woke up after Cairo.

“—deliberately obtuse not to acknowledge that the world is today a safer place for the absence of nuclear weapons, though I had hoped this state would be reached through diplomacy and negotiation, not at the behest of a megalomaniac—”

Except there it was again. No, there _he_ was again. In the back of the room, a flash of ginger hair and a familiar frown. Not familiar was the rest of it: the perfectly tailored suit, the clean-shaven jaw, fashionably long hair, and strangest of all, the absence of weaponized metal and some grandiose speech about the injustice of this trial and the slippery slope of persecuting mutants.

“—well aware that political factors are in play here, far above a professor’s pay grade, or the charges against me would not be so incendiary and would have been filed with The Hague, as En Sabah Nur’s impact was global—”

He tried to consider the situation rationally. The way he saw it—though his vision was admittedly fuzzy, both literally and metaphorically—there were four possibilities: Erik was here; Erik had a doppelganger; Charles had cracked; this really was a dream.

But Charles’s dreams tended to be a slightly-worn greatest hits album these days, and he suspected the same would be true of his perception of “reality” in the event of a total mental breakdown. His subconscious was as exhausted as the rest of him and so wasn’t much good at coming up with surprising details or new scenarios, and he’d certainly had enough dreams about Erik to know how they went. A few even set in courtrooms like this one. Childish rescue fantasies, for the most part, which he took refuge in as often as possible even as they make him feel embarrassingly reminiscent of a damsel in distress.

Only Erik was always instantly recognizable in those dreams, though he alternated between various ridiculous cape-and-armor getups and the more conservative turtleneck he favored back in 1962, and never hesitant. He sprang into action immediately and angrily, as he always had. He was fierce and protective and merciless and if this were a dream most of the audience would be dead already.  

So. Where did that leave Charles? Staring at a stranger?

A stranger would hardly have reason to look so concerned, though. The general public’s sympathy for him was fickle at best and had taken a notable nosedive as the trial approached, though Moira and Hank had tried to phrase it more diplomatically than that. “Uphill battle regarding public perception,” or something like that.

There was a half-crazed look people got when they were trying their hardest to communicate telepathically. The man who might be Erik had it now—he looked downright alarmed, eyes boring into Charles’s with such intensity he could almost feel the psionic energy dissipating against the suppressor. Finally the man gave up and coughed instead, a loud bark that drew attention to the room’s utter silence.

Oh. Charles wondered when he stopped talking. Multitasking wasn’t his forte these days—reading and thinking were difficult enough on their own, never mind together. He fumbled, shuffled his papers, tried to find the place he trailed off. His memory was for shit recently too. An opening statement like this would have taken him less than twenty minutes to memorize to perfection once; now, three days with it and the words still slipped away, refusing to stick in his short-term memory.

God, his head hurt. His head always hurt, but now the pain was stabbing instead of the usual throbbing ache. For a moment he pondered some grand cinematic gesture—throwing the prepared statement aside, speaking from his heart, winning them over with his spontaneous sincerity. He’d had such a knack for that kind of thing once…

_You’ll have to forgive me…not much human interaction recently…used to being ignored…I’d appreciate your attention if I didn’t half-believe you’re all robots…_

Moira caught his eye, glaring like she was the mind-reader, and Charles managed a wry smile. Perhaps not, then.

“—would have been filed with The Hague, as En Sabah Nur’s impact was global,” he tried, picking the last sentence he remembered. This time he kept his eyes glued to the page, refusing to be distracted by the man who might be Erik. “The isolationist ideology favored by the country’s current Republican leadership results in a peculiar cognitive dissonance when events of such worldwide importance occur. En Sabah Nur’s nonconsensual use of my telepathic abilities serves as a prime example. They’ve been quick to label me a traitor and a danger to this country when the same action obliterated the danger we faced from other nuclear-capable countries who have made our destruction their number one priority. We do not exist in a vacuum, and to proceed with this trial as though we do is shortsighted, dishonest, and refuses to take into account the new global landscape on which we find ourselves.”

There was more after that—long pages of it—and he grit his teeth and ignored his headache and powered through it. He flashed back to his Oxford digs once or twice, long nights spent cramming before orals, stuffing his brain with so much information the tissue itself seemed to ache. Or that 3 a.m. drunkenness peppered with short blackouts, three seconds missing here, ten seconds missing there. Back in the real world scattered words registered every so often, frequently enough that he was reasonably sure he never trailed off again, but his voice sounded like it was coming from far away or belonged to someone else. A monotone, not very engaging to an audience, the professorial part of him whispered critically.

“—hope to accomplish, Your Honor. Thank you—”

He flipped the page. Nothing was left. Wrong intonation. Repeated it again, more firmly: “Thank you.”

“Thank you, Dr. Xavier,” the judge returned. Stiffly or politely—it was hard to tell. His face was impassive, as a judge’s should be. He had a wide mouth and eyes set far apart underneath bushy eyebrows and would look kind if he smiled, Charles thought, but odds of that were slim. Lee Parsons Gagliardi was ten years on this bench, appointed by Nixon, rumor had it due to assume senior status in a year or two. Good at his job, capable, fair. That was the most they could hope for.

A bailiff helped him back to his seat next to Hank, and just like that it was over. The prosecution had made their opening statement first and Gagliardi gave a small speech in summary now—not that Charles would remember a word of either. The wave of relief that swept over him left him light-headed, grateful for the grounding pressure of Hank’s hand on his shoulder. Time skipped again, another fade-to-black before color bled back into the world, and the next thing he knew the judge had left the chambers, the audience was shuffling to its feet, and Moira and Hank were exchanging significant looks over his head before Moira made a beeline for the bailiff already on his way to their table. Charles watched curiously. She looked like she was…distracting him?

“Charles.”

The voice came from behind him. Charles turned, stared.

“It _was_ you,” he said. “I…”

He trailed off. Erik stood just a foot away, close enough to touch, and every banal observation, every stray thought Charles had saved up between those too-rare phone calls for the next time they spoke had evaporated from his head. The space between his ears felt entirely empty.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” he managed. Not a platitude—the stone-cold truth.

Erik crouched down next to his chair, which normally Charles would have hated because it smacked of condescension—but now it brought Erik’s face closer, and Charles couldn’t muster any irritation at all.

“Believe it,” Erik said. He had never sounded so gentle and there was nothing of resentment or rage in the way he took Charles’s hand and simply held it between both of his own. Moira and Hank had made an effort to touch him whenever they were allowed or could find the flimsiest excuses—shaking his hand more than necessary, supportive pats on the shoulder, adjusting his tie or suit jacket—but the fact remained that Charles was cruelly touch-starved. What physical contact he’d had since Cairo had been perfunctory, clinical, and frequently painful. He’d been so completely isolated in every way that the warmth of Erik’s skin and the callouses on his palms registered as shock before they transmuted into comfort.

Breathless with something that could just as easily have been desperation as happiness, Charles asked, “Where have you been?”

“Right where I told you I’d be,” Erik said. It sounded like an apology. His thumb swept over the back of Charles’s hand in a repetitive soothing rhythm.

“That’s terribly out of character for you. You never do what I ask. You do the opposite, in fact. Swooping in to save the day by ruining everything—you wouldn’t even need a helmet this time. My powers are already blocked.”

It was a weak joke—weaker for only being half a joke to begin with. Even if he hadn’t currently been rubbish at reading facial expressions Charles suspected he would have had difficulty deciphering the one Erik wore at the moment—a rueful smile, a pained grimace, something between the two? Erik might not have known himself. His thoughts were probably no more orderly but Charles would still have given anything to feel them; not even read them, he couldn’t bear Erik’s resentment and rejection of his telepathy right now, but just _sense_ them. As his memory became foggier it became more and more difficult to recreate the unique sensation of Erik’s mind—the quicksilver-brightness of it, how it ran cool when he was calm and burning cold when rage consumed him.  

Erik looked him up and down, eyes catching on his smooth scalp and the suppressor anchored at his temples. Charles hadn’t seen a mirror in a long time but he gathered from the more visible bones in his wrists and ribs that he’d lost a good bit of weight. Erik confirmed that suspicion with a frown and a flat, “You don’t look good.”

“You do.”

Erik rolled his eyes but he also squeezed Charles’s hand, and for the briefest instant they shared the first sincere smile Charles remembered in weeks. He’d stopped even feigning them for Moira and Hank several Pentagon visits ago—not because he was less grateful to or worried about them, but simply because his energy reserves were so low that he couldn’t expend them on anything nonessential. Getting through each day required giving himself the pep talk he had once saved for them and…well, he’d become more selfish, he supposed, streamlining his empathy in the name of self-preservation. But the people who would care hadn’t noticed, and the people who had noticed didn’t care.

“I’m tired,” he confessed without meaning to. He always had had a compulsion to tell Erik the truth, even when it tore them apart. “I’m so tired, Erik. And my head…I know what’s happening, though I’m unclear on why, sometimes. They don’t tell me anything. Better me than the children, of course, or Raven, or you, but—”

He was talking in circles around the real confession: _I’m afraid._ It had been his greatest fear since childhood that if he let go, if he lost control of his powers or himself, he would never have a firm grasp on anything, ever again. Control was the reason for everything. He would never willingly relinquish it, and having it taken from him by the suppression device was almost as terrifying as Apocalypse’s hijacking of his mind had been—an experience he’d never been given time to recover from, one violation on the heels of the other. Now he was fighting to keep himself together, and he suspected he was losing. Right now keeping his eyes dry was a massive victory in itself.

He hadn’t wanted Erik to see this, but that was the trouble with Erik. He’d always seen right to the heart of Charles’s weaknesses.

“Listen to me. Charles, listen.” Erik made nonsensical soothing noises, pressing one hand along the side of his face for just an instant as he leaned in closer and continued in a rushed whisper too soft for anyone else to hear. “You’re doing so well. You’re the strongest person I know and you’re proving it every day. I just need you to hold on a little longer. Between rage and serenity, remember? Find that anchor.”

Physical contact wasn’t as grounding as psychic contact but it was far better than nothing, and Erik’s proximity combined with the certainty in his voice held Charles’s potential hysteria at bay, long enough that he could take a deep breath and regain that increasingly fragile equilibrium. Then what Erik had actually said registered, and if the words themselves hadn’t been ominous enough, the intent in his expression gave him away. Charles sighed. “Oh, no. You have a plan.”

Instead of answering—which was its own answer—Erik’s gaze flicked over to the bailiff, who had finally escaped from Moira and was coming towards them, his walk fast and jerky with irritation. “I’m sorry we don’t have more time. Don’t worry, Charles. Focus on yourself and I’ll take care of the rest.”

“What are you going to do?” Charles hissed.

Erik smiled in a way that was probably meant to be reassuring despite the worrying number of teeth and the implicit promise of pain for anyone who stood in his way…and in fact was more reassuring than Charles felt was appropriate. But he’d take comfort anywhere he could find it these days.

“I told you, don’t worry. I’m only going to keep my promise,” Erik said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry it took so long and is so short and i still haven't gotten to some comments--i am the actual worst and you guys are the actual best. remember when i used to do a 4k chapter a week? what happened to THAT


	11. Witness Testimony (1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik imprints on Jean like a sad lil baby duckling, Jean's like um k

Jean had known for a while now that Erik was thinking of asking her to do something unconscionable. Or maybe he thought the request was unconscionable, not the thing itself…it was hard to tell without going deeper into his mind than she was comfortable with without permission. His psyche lit up all over with different colors of guilt, red-purple-green like a fading bruise, and she didn’t want to touch it any more than she had to.  

Not that she’d needed her powers to figure it out, really. For the past few weeks he’d come out of grown-up conclaves with Raven and Hank and Moira in the study and look at her like he’d just betrayed her in some terrible way, shame so poorly hidden she could read it in his body language, never mind his thoughts. Part of her, the part that was nervous about it, whatever _it_ was, wanted to march up to him and ask him what was going on. But the older part of her that had saved them all in Cairo and sometimes thought of itself as the Phoenix knew that he needed kindness and patience and was already stretched thinner than he’d thought he could bear. He’d tell her in time.

She knew that time had come when he returned to the mansion early. Dr. McCoy and Agent MacTaggart were staying in New York City most of the time now and Erik had planned to do the same for at least the first few days of the Professor’s trial. The deviation from that plan would have said enough even if his mind hadn’t been shouting determination and anger and a kind of wounded protectiveness loud enough to be heard when he was still half an hour away. He felt like Magneto again.

Jean waited in the kitchen sipping tea, but Erik went straight to Raven’s room, a dark cloud of intent sweeping through the foyer and up the stairs, and hadn’t come out by the time Jean went to bed. She lay under the blankets with her hands folded beneath her head and felt the impressions of their thoughts drift down the hall and wash over her—Erik’s charged like storm-clouds, Raven’s cold like a winter wind. They were still talking when she fell asleep, thought patterns converging but not yet identical as they came to some kind of agreement.

It was decided by morning. Jean woke up certain of it and didn’t even bother to feign surprise when Erik stuck his head into the Danger Room mid-training session.

“I need to borrow Jean,” he said.

Raven dismissed her with a jerk of her head. Jean hurried after Erik, who’d already started back down the hall towards Hank’s lab where he’d spent most of the morning. She felt awkward and ungainly, scurrying to keep up with his long strides, and suddenly anxious.

“How much do you know of what happened yesterday?” Erik asked without looking at her.

Had she been spelunking in anyone’s head, he meant. It was an honest question these days, not an accusation. In the first five minutes of working with him on the mansion’s reconstruction she’d seen that Erik had an unusually fraught relationship with telepathy—he was drawn to it and repelled by it at the same time. He hadn’t asked her to stay out of his head, but she’d known that he’d wanted to and done it anyway. Minds that were repulsed by telepathy felt gross, some combination of sour and slippery, with an aftertaste that took hours to fade. Erik tried now, but Jean couldn’t imagine how bad it must have been for the Professor years ago, reaching out to Erik again and again only to be confronted with _that._

“I only know what I saw on the news,” she said, letting the euphemism rest. “And one of the papers published a transcript of the Professor’s opening statement. I thought it was good.”

“The statement was fine. The problem was the delivery.”

The lab was echoing and empty; a few machines hummed in the background, nothing she could identify, but otherwise it was silent. Jean had never been here without Dr. McCoy present and it felt strange to have Erik be the one in command of the space. They sat on uncomfortable stools at the nearest table. He drummed his fingernails on the stainless steel surface once, collecting his thoughts.

“There’s no time to be delicate about this. Charles isn’t well, Jean,” he said. “The suppression device is doing him what could be irreparable damage. His speech is slurred, his memory is shot, he can’t focus or process new sensory input at his usual speed. He’s in no state to defend himself or respond to the most patient questioning, which we know he won’t get. The prosecution is out to destroy him. Even if he doesn’t get any worse, it’ll be a bloodbath.”

Jean didn’t know what to say, so she just nodded. She’d gathered most of that already, reading between the lines in newspaper articles and evening news reports, but nothing made the situation real like Erik’s quiet despair and way he tried to hide it behind a clinical list of symptoms. His hands were folded on the table, fingers tangled together white-knuckled, and she thought of reaching out but decided against it. Erik didn’t need comfort, he needed an ally, someone he could trust.

“What can I do to help?” she said, sounding stronger than she felt. “I haven’t looked but I can tell you have a plan, everyone around here knows. The four of you aren’t exactly subtle.”

Erik cracked a rueful smile that didn’t reach his eyes before it vanished.

“We want to help,” Jean said insistently. “All of us. We care about him just as much as you do.”

Greatly daring and annoyed at being kept in the dark like…like one of the _children_ , she almost added _even if it’s not in the same way_. Even if Jean hadn’t seen more of the two of them than she was strictly comfortable with on her whirlwind ride through the Professor’s memories in Cairo, Erik was either out of practice hiding his feelings or had made a conscious decision not to bother. His grief for his wife’s death and his grief for the pain Charles was enduring were only a few shades apart; he had the devotion of a war widow and the single-minded focus of an expert assassin and it was all for Charles. Jean was amazed that none of the dozens of reporters who had come to interview him had asked about the exact nature of his relationship with the Professor. It was _that_ obvious.

But it probably wasn’t the best time to poke this particular bear with that particular stick, and fortunately she didn’t need to. Erik took her at her word.

“There is…a way out of this. But I need you to help me find someone.”

His enunciation made it clear that he meant using her telepathy.

“No problem,” she said, trying not to preen a little. “Where am I looking? New York City? I’ve been practicing, my range is—”

“That’s the problem. They could be anywhere. You’ll need to use Cerebro.”

A shiver went up Jean’s spine, a strange mix of fear and Christmas-morning anticipation. “Am I…allowed to do that?”

“We’re all bending the rules these days,” Erik said. “Though _bending_ will be an understatement, if this works.”

Jean was still struggling to wrap her head around the idea. She’d known Cerebro had been rebuilt, she’d even helped levitate some of the panels into place before Erik took over with that metallokinetic’s greed for perfect calibration, but she hadn’t known that it was functional. And to use it herself, to have access to that much power, that many minds—she’d fantasized about it before, of course she had, but with her telepathy so unstable she’d never thought it would be safe. The image of a kid crouched over an anthill with a magnifying glass popped into her head.

“But Cerebro is…the Professor’s,” she said uncertainly. That didn’t make a lot of sense—it was more a gut feeling than a real sticking point—but Erik nodded like he understood. He had that look again, something soft and kind and _paternal_ that she’d seen when they were working together sometimes. Like he was proud of her. She didn’t think he knew he was doing it and had never brought it up for fear it would send him into some kind of shame spiral, convinced he was disrespecting his daughter. Jean knew it wasn’t anyone’s fault. She was young enough to be a symbol of what Nina could have been and Erik was still a father, that was all. And there was something selfishly gratifying about knowing the great Magneto had faith in her.

“I know,” Erik was saying. “I never liked the thing myself, and after what it did to Charles, with En Sabah Nur…It’s a lot to put on you. If there was any other way…You can say no, if we’re asking too much.”

“I’m not saying no,” Jean said quickly. “It’s just…do you think it’s safe? I could have really hurt people in Cairo, and my powers weren’t even amplified then.”

Erik shrugged like that hadn’t even occurred to him, like it was non-issue. “I think you can do it. Raven does too, and Hank and Moira. Trust us if you can’t trust yourself.”

Jean chewed her lower lip and looked around the lab, still hesitant. It was almost identical to the old lab—the same things in the same places, but the newness of them lent a subtle sense of wrongness, of _something’s off._ It was in the shine of new metal, the upgraded equipment and streamlined technology. A reminder that for all things seemed the same nothing was, and this façade of normalcy was untenable or worse—in danger of becoming more than just a façade. Somewhere deep down the Phoenix sighed, stretched its wings. She looked back at Erik, suddenly focused.

“You’ll be there, right? You’ll shut it down if anything goes wrong. You’ll stop me if you need to.”

“I will,” Erik said. There was no doubt in his mind that he was telling the truth and so no doubt in hers either.

“Okay. When?”

“No time like the present,” Erik said.

Jean took a deep breath and repeated, “Okay.”

Cerebro was through a door at the back of the lab, down a short hallway, and through another door. Even with pauses for Erik to navigate the biosensors—a thumbprint on one door and a retinal scan at the other—it took less than a minute to get there. There was no time for Jean to freeze up, to doubt herself, to do anything other than keep up with Erik and do what he said. She stared down at the helmet he’d handed her while he stood at the console, powering up the machine. She hadn’t been at the mansion when En Sabah Nur took control of the Professor through a helmet that looked just like this one but she’d relived the memory with him when she’d brought him back in Cairo. The shock of that moment had seared itself on her mind like it was her own memory—the joy of touching Erik’s mind again and grief at the magnitude of his loss so quickly transmuted to confusion at another, darker presence and then a stab of fear—

“Jean?”

Erik stood in front of her, frowning with concern and, underneath that, impatience to finish what they’d started. Cerebro hummed all around them, warm and ready.

“I wish I didn’t have to ask you to do this,” he said. That _look_ was back, gentler and more trusting than ever. “I wish none of you had to be in danger again, but that is not the world we live in.”

“That’s not your fault,” Jean said, because it felt like something he needed to hear. With a burst of determination, she lifted the helmet and put it on, making a face as she adjusted it over her long hair.

“You’ll have to teach me how to fix helmet hair after this,” she said. “Now who am I looking for?”

Erik smiled, though it wasn’t exactly pleasant. “An old friend of mine. I need to know where Psylocke is hiding herself these days.”

Whatever expression was on her face made him laugh for the first time in days. To hide her embarrassment at her lapse in what she had been considering impressively adult behavior, Jean slammed her eyes shut and growled, “Fire it up, then.”

She opened them again involuntarily a moment later when a burst of power crashed over her, enough to throw her head back and leave her staring blindly at the ceiling. Seizure-like tremors wracked her limbs and she nearly fell before she regained enough equilibrium to keep from spinning out of her body altogether. The electromagnetic energy surge was a kick in the head and the psychic energy burst that followed hit her mutation like a shot of adrenaline. She heard a weak cry echo off the metal walls but it seemed inconceivable that it could come from her when she’d never felt stronger in her life. The temptation to let go of her physical anchor and slide into Cerebro’s purely psychic realm was almost irresistible. It was better than Cairo, better than any drug.

She was vaguely aware that there were hands on her shoulders and a voice shouting in her ear. “Jean! Focus!”

With an effort, Jean tore her attention away from idly sifting through half the minds on the East Coast and pulled everything she remembered about Psylocke to the front of her mind. En Sabah Nur had found her in Berlin, hadn’t he? Best to start in Europe, then, if she’d fled back behind the Iron Curtain. There was safety there, of a sort, underground networks and black markets for mutants and political dissidents alike. Jean could see them now, a literal network laid out in midair with each mutant mind a bright red point and clusters reflecting population centers in Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Hamburg. Minds with psionic mutations had a distinct feel, denser than a non-psionic’s; Psylocke wouldn’t be hard to find, if Jean could narrow the search field down a little.  

What else did she know? Psylocke had been the easiest to recruit and En Sabah Nur’s most devoted acolyte. He’d preyed on Ororo’s need for a family, Warren’s desire to be whole again, and Erik’s suicidal despair—but Psylocke had come for power. She was drawn to strength. That wasn’t a weakness, it was a personality trait, and those didn’t change easily. Even in defeat she would have gone somewhere she could gain power over others. A place in turmoil—civil unrest, political upheaval, high rates of organized crime, anything that would create a power vacuum.

Impulsively Jean swung her focus to the East Mediterranean. Between news reports on the aftermath of the almost-apocalypse and Charles’s trial, she’d seen a few segments on tensions in Cyprus. Something about Turkish troops declaring the northern part of the island its own nation, throwing Cyprus and the surrounding Mediterranean countries into chaos. Where better to grab and solidify power than a fledgling nation?

And there it was, the pull of a psionic mind, cold and calculating with an impish streak that Jean barely stopped herself from examining further. Psylocke would sense the intrusion of any abnormal telepathic energy and she was much quicker and more confident in her powers than Jean. If she gave her presence away, Psylocke would attack—or worse, disappear.

“Gotcha,” Jean said, or maybe just thought.

Carefully, she edged closer, trailing telepathic fingers not over Psylocke herself but over the minds of the soldiers around her. They all knew Psylocke was a mutant and respected her, with that kind of loyalty that was half awe and half fear. Jean borrowed a set of eyes just long enough to examine their physical surroundings: the drawing room of a hotel turned into some kind of war-room, papers and guns strewn over heavy wooden tables, sunlight dappling the streets outside. She pulled the location from the same mind: the Karpass Peninsula, a small town called Rizokarpaso at the far northeast corner of the island.

 _Turn it off,_ she projected to Erik, not entirely sure she was capable of traditional speech right now. The idea of voluntarily disengaging from Cerebro—giving up such power, such perfect control now that she had it—was absurd. She wanted to stay inside it forever, luxuriating in pure psychic energy like a warm bath, with all the minds in the world lapping against her telepathy. The small voice whispering that was a bad idea, the Professor had always kept his own sessions short for a reason, was barely audible and she wasn’t sure she was strong enough to listen to it herself.

But Erik heard. Suddenly the countless red dots projected into the air like a global neural network vanished and Jean’s head was agonizingly empty. After such amplification her powers at their usual level felt nonexistent; she had the unshakeable conviction that she was small and alone and so very, very out of her depth. It was as strange as it was overwhelming—she had been braced for a headache, nausea, some kind of physical withdrawal symptoms, but not this… _sadness._

Instinctively she wrapped her arms around herself and started crying. It was Erik who had to lift the helmet off her head and Erik who had to help her back down the walkway when she was still too stunned and blinded by tears to walk alone. She wasn’t aware of much but crushing loss and the folds of his sweater crushed beneath her fingers for a long time.

“Drink this, Jean,” Erik said firmly.

They were in the kitchen and there was a steaming cup of tea on the table in front of her. When had that happened?

Jean sniffed and rubbed her nose on her sleeve, already too embarrassed to care that she probably looked even more pathetic. “I’m so sorry, I—”

“Drink it,” Erik said again.

She obeyed, cheeks burning, trying not to imagine how childish and weak she must look right now, after Erik had entrusted her with something so important. There was honey in the tea the way she liked it and as her stomach warmed and her tears dried she slowly gathered the courage to look up at him again.

“Psylocke’s in Cypress,” she said, hoping the information would serve as an apology, or at least a reminder that she wasn’t entirely useless. “Northeast tip of the island, someplace called Rizokarpaso. She’s helping the Turks—or they’re helping her.”

Erik nodded. His eyes were narrowed, sharp, and after a flare of triumph his mind took on that mechanical precision that meant it was assimilating new information, calculating next steps. Like it was a fact, he said, “You did well.”

“I fell apart,” Jean said, blushing again.

“You got the job done,” Erik shrugged. He added dryly, “Charles spent the afternoon with his head in the toilet the first time he used Cerebro.”

Jean laughed. Her mood had lightened enough that she could think past her own misery again and to the implications of what she’d just done. She was part of something now, the “way out” Erik had mentioned so vaguely.

“Why Psylocke?”

But Erik was already getting to his feet, as she’d suspected he would as soon as she asked any real questions. “I’ll explain it when I can. I have things to do now. Take the rest of the morning off and rest.” He paused by her chair on the way to the door, put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently. He had that proud look again and Jean felt comforted by it even as she knew it should never have been directed at her—it was an expression that belonged to another girl, one who should be here and wasn’t. But if it had to be for her instead, she’d do the best she could to deserve it. She forced a smile and nodded up at him, tried to look fine and put together and not at all like she was still reeling from the intensity of Cerebro.

“Thank you, Jean,” he said from the doorway.

Jean turned her head to say something light, how much she would enjoy a nap, maybe, but Erik was already gone, his mind a blur of travel logistics and airline tickets.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> guys this is no longer my least popular story yaaaaaay
> 
> (i am trash who thrives on validation from strangers, what can i say)


	12. Witness Testimony (2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Is there a reverse Bechdel Test where two dudes have to talk about something other than women? B/c this chapter does not pass it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long/is so short/generally awful. First time I've been tempted to scrap a chapter entirely and start over but also I am so lazy. So instead of a road trip chap this turned into Erik and Peter bonding feat. an info dump and a terrible plan.

When Erik came barreling into the den with a strange manic light in his eyes and a sense of purpose wafting off him like an obnoxiously strong new cologne, Peter’s first instinct was to back away slowly. He’d only ever seen that kind of excitement when Erik came up with increasingly flimsy excuses for them to spend time together or when he was talking about Charles; the rest of the time his dad—and would that _ever_ feel normal?—spent lurking around the mansion, kind of like a sad ghost. So he knew right away that something was up. But even Peter’s vivid imagination couldn’t have anticipated—

“A road trip?”

“It’s not a road trip,” Erik said, though he couldn’t quite suppress the hint of a grin. “It’s a mission, a dangerous one, and I could use your help.”

“I don’t know, man, it definitely sounds like a road trip.”

His enthusiasm waned a little around the time Erik explained that their destination was a war-torn island Peter couldn’t point to on a map if his life depended on it and where, more crucially, that bat-shit babe with the purple energy swords from Cairo was now hanging out.

Or, as Erik boringly put it: “Psylocke’s mutation allows her to form tangible weapons and shields from psionic energy, which she can also use to create vortices through space.”

Which, okay, did sound useful in case of the war Peter still wasn’t convinced Erik wasn’t secretly preparing for, no matter what he’d said to Charles, but didn’t explain why it was suddenly so damn urgent to befriend someone who’d been ready to kill them all last time they’d met—and looked like she’d have a great time doing it.

“There’s no way this can like…wait, until after the trial? In case she shivs us with those energy things and we don’t make it back? Why’s it so important to go after her now?”

The thing about moving as fast as Peter could was that it turned split seconds into eternities. Anyone else would have missed the thought process that unfolded in Erik’s head but Peter saw the whole thing like it was a full-length movie, the kind that took four hours like that melodramatic Russian one his mom liked. First there was the instinct to lie, the distrust that was constitutional, not personal—compounded by piercing guilt as Erik remembered that the last two people he’d entrusted with his secrets had died in a Polish forest—a desperate determination that nothing would happen to what little family he’d somehow been allowed to keep—then Erik visibly reminding himself that this wasn’t Nina, Peter was a grown man and overprotectiveness was the surest way to drive him away—

It played out on his face in nothing more than a slight frown and briefly clenched jaw but Peter read every micro-expression and flicker of emotion in those eyes and knew the decision he’d made almost before Erik knew himself.

“Come with me. I won’t talk about this here.”

Here meant in the den—playroom, TV room, whatever the kids called it—where anyone could pass by or overhear. They went to the Professor’s study instead and Erik welded the doors shut behind them with a painful screech. Peter had a millisecond of regret that he’d been so flippant before—at least he hadn’t said _father-son road_ trip—because this was starting to feel like some serious James Bond-type shit instead of just Erik’s usual paranoia. Then again he didn’t bring much to the table besides a sense of humor and a useful mutation, so he might as well stick with what he did best.

“So lay it on me, man.”

Erik ignored his favorite armchair near a never-used chessboard, remained standing in the center of the room with his arms crossed. “First promise me that everything we say here stays between us. The fewer people know the full extent of this, the better.”

“Fewer links, stronger chain, got it. You and me,” Peter promised, hoping he sounded mature and nonchalant instead of secretly gleeful that Erik had picked him to confide in. Even if that _was_ strategically unavoidable, from what vague hints he’d gotten so far.

“It’s become clear to me that Charles will not make it through the trial if he continues to deteriorate at the rate Moira and Hank have observed. Even if he gets no worse than he was yesterday his chances are vanishingly small. I cannot—and will not—stand by and let these corrupt, cowardly humans reduce his reputation and life’s work to nothingness while simultaneously destroying his mind and body.”

The really scary thing was how calm Erik sounded, like these were simple facts and not a total reversal of their entire strategy so far. Not that Peter disagreed: what had happened to Charles over the past few months was bullshit and he’d been in favor of breaking him out since the beginning. Except Erik had structured his entire existence around keeping that dumb promise…until now, apparently.

“So that whole don’t-start-a-war-on-my-behalf, the-humans-will-see-reason-eventually agreement you made with him is just…out the window? No offense, but it’s about time—”

“Oh, not just yet,” Erik said. Peter had a moment to be incredibly thankful that creepy smiles weren’t genetic. “If all goes according to plan we can ensure Charles’s innocence _and_ his safety.”

That made zero sense, but there was a more pressing issue. Hesitantly, Peter said, “You know, historically your plans are—not super.”

“It might comfort you to know that this one is not entirely mine, then. And it will require all of us doing our part to pull off successfully.”

“Including Psylocke? She’s not exactly…subtle. Or reliable, probably.”

“Leave Psylocke to me,” Erik said, with rather more confidence than seemed warranted given their history. He’d betrayed her too when he turned on Apocalypse, after all. Then again who knew—they’d spent roughly a day together as Horsemen and Apocalypse couldn’t have spent the _whole_ time giving megalomaniacal monologues. There must have been some downtime when the Horsemen were left to their own devices, bonding over their respective dysfunctions, sharing their hopes for a human-free world, complimenting each other’s new looks. Maybe they had learned something about each other. Of course Erik’s grief-induced fugue state had probably dampened his already-negligible amiability at the time but he’d spent the past few months proving that he could be charming as hell when he wanted to be.

“So that makes me the glorified taxi service,” Peter said, slowly catching on. “I get us past all those reporters outside, on the next plane to…wherever you said, and you avoid making headlines for returning to your terrorist ways. Stealing jets, recruiting crazy mutant supremacists for vague yet undoubtedly nefarious purposes, and so on. Stay stealthy now so…what, it’s a total surprise when we break into the Pentagon with guns and purple psychic swords blazing?”

Maybe he wasn’t catching on after all, because Erik’s response was wry laughter. “Charles would never forgive me if I rescued him as clumsily as he rescued me. Let’s aim for something slightly subtler.”

“And Psylocke will be what, a diversion?”

Erik raised one eyebrow in a way that said _come on, you can do better than that_. He was never more dad-like than in moments when Peter wasn’t getting something Erik thought was obvious. If he hadn’t still been so torn up over Magda and Nina, Peter was one hundred percent sure the words “you get that from your mother” would have become Erik’s favorite criticism long ago—probably the first time he caught Peter putting a knife on the edge of the sink to use again later instead of washing it immediately.

 And Peter was never more kid-like than when Erik gave him that expectant look and Peter realized he’d run to the moon and back to earn an almost imperceptible nod of approval instead.

So. Psylocke. Not a diversion. Not about those flashy katanas. Something else. He could figure this out—he was a smart kid, or would have been if he’d ever taken school seriously, his mom said. He thought better in motion so he went for a lap around the grounds at top speed, goggles on and hair flying. By the time he made it back to the study one second later, he thought he had it.

“The vortices thing,” he said triumphantly, only a little breathless. “That’s why you want her on board. No distraction needed if you skip the front door. You fry the security cameras with your powers, she goes in right on top of the Professor, gets him out through the vortex, nobody sees a thing. He’s gotta be alone, of course—and then there’s the whole uproar when he’s suddenly evaporated from his cell…”

He trailed off deliberately, not seeing a way out of that one. Sure, Charles’s disappearance would stop the trial, but only so its resources could be allocated to a worldwide manhunt that would eventually find the mountain Erik had probably already hollowed out to hide the two of them away in. Or the cabin in the middle of Siberia. The isolated beach bungalow. Erik had contingency plans that had been in place for _decades,_ Peter was willing to bet.

Except Erik was looking strangely…displeased, instead of stoked about absconding with the Professor.

“I’d like to stress that the next part was _not_ my idea,” he said. “I happen to disagree with it entirely. But it was pointed out to me, persuasively, that the fastest, safest way to end this is to play out this farce on the human’s terms. Charles doesn’t have to be there for the trial to continue. It just needs to look like he is. And we do know someone who can look like anyone.”

The penny was the size of a dinner plate by the time it dropped. Peter took an involuntary step forward, fists clenched.

“No way! She can’t do that. _Tell her_ she can’t do that.”

“And how does that usually go for you, telling Mystique what to do?” Erik said, smirking. He was going for wry and unaffected but didn’t quite hit it; there was an anxious edge to his flippancy that said he’d already tried Peter’s suggestion. Peter wondered if Raven had even let him get the words “no you can’t” out before she’d whacked him upside the head like he was one of the kids misbehaving. Too agitated to stand still, he paced back and forth across the room, fast enough that he was nothing but a blur and a disembodied voice.

“This is crazy. Shit, it’s even worse than one of _your_ plans. They’re torturing the Professor in there and you’re just gonna let Mystique step in and take his place? Psylocke was one thing but this is like—like—”

No inspiration struck for what this was like. Erik leaped into the rare beat of silence, sounding like he was trying to convince himself as much as Peter.

“We’re poor teammates if we can’t trust our best to know her own mind. They think they have Charles tamed, broken. All Mystique needs to do is maintain that illusion. If something goes wrong, well…that’s when we ‘go in with guns and purple psychic swords blazing,’ as you said.”

“How are we supposed to know if something goes wrong? She’ll be totally alone!” Peter could hear his voice creeping higher, shriller, but the worst case scenarios—and there were _so many_ of them—were hitting him hard and fast now. “What if they hurt her so bad she loses control and reverts back to herself? What if they like, draw blood or run DNA or try to test the telepathy she doesn’t have? What if someone catches on when she’s in court? I mean, perjury is the _least_ of our worries.”

“Perjury,” Erik echoed, but Peter wasn’t in the mood to allow him a moment of levity.

“There’s gotta be another way.”

Erik’s eyes went flinty and when he spoke his voice matched. “Then feel free to share it, by all means. I would welcome another option that doesn’t involve sending one of the few people I care about into this kind of danger. But if you don’t have a better idea, help me—or don’t. I’m not fucking around here, Peter.”

Only the weirdness of hearing his dad curse cut through the heebie-jeebies that ran up Peter’s spine as Erik turned on a dime from reassuring father figure to Magneto in full Vigilante Justice Mode. Even at Peter’s speed it seemed to happen instantaneously, a total shift in body language as his focus turned from Raven to the mission. Sometimes it was easy to forget Erik still had that in him. He spent so much time working, lurking, mourning, that the nutcase who’d put a stadium around the White House ten years ago and almost annihilated two fleets in Cuba ten years before that seemed almost a separate person. Cairo was easy—maybe too easy—to justify as Apocalypse’s manipulation of grief-induced psychosis and Erik had been astonishingly (perhaps ominously) stable and capable in its aftermath. But every once in a while there was a flash of that guy, the one with the stadium and the missiles and the absolute control over magnetic fields, and he was…

Well, fucking terrifying was a start.

But also…strangely reassuring? Magneto was a force of nature. A guy who could get things done. His plans were terrible but if they weren’t—if Erik could harness that sense of purpose and hold the homicidal impulse at bay just long enough—he could be a hell of an ally. All Peter would have to do is follow directions, do his part—and trust the rest of them to do theirs.

“Okay. I’m not going to be the weak link here. I’m in,” he said. He held out his hand, because for some strange reason this felt like the kind of compact you shook on.

Erik’s grip was firm, his smile was tight and satisfied. “We’ll leave tonight after dark. Get us to town as quickly as possible—there’s a car waiting there. We’ll drive to the airport so you don’t exhaust yourself immediately.”

“Save it for getting on the plane and once we’re in Cyprus, got it.” And then, because even his scary dad couldn’t put a damper on his chronic inability to take serious situations…well, seriously, Peter added, “Non-negotiable pit stop for Doritos and donuts, though. It’s not a road trip without snacks.”


	13. Witness Testimony (3)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the pieces fall into place

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i did a bunch of research on psylocke in the comics and she sounds totally bangin and sadly not at all compatible with movie!psylocke, who had approximately zero personality? so rather than make her history the focal point of the story i just tried to extrapolate what movie psylocke WOULD have been like based on the few decisions we saw her make. hopefully she doesn't come off like an OC!

Psylocke didn’t think of herself as Elizabeth Braddock anymore. The name itself sounded absurd, so far removed from her current reality that it connoted a stranger—and not one Psylocke would have liked, either. Girls named Elizabeth Braddock lived in the countryside and went to private schools and had nuclear families and at their naughtiest stole from their parents’ liquor cabinets with their giggling friends. They had nicknames like Betsy.

Psylocke at her naughtiest tended to be a little bit more…unpredictable. Signing on to help ancient demigods end the world levels of unpredictable.

Not that she’d seen that one coming; it wasn’t like she’d woken up that morning planning to usher in the apocalypse by day’s end. The annihilation of billions had never been on her agenda, as much as she ever had an agenda. Life of the mercenary, and all that. Jobs and missions gave her life structure and then only for a few days, sometimes a few months if it was a complicated gig. It was the world’s bad luck that she’d wrapped up a boring snatch job from a Soviet official the day before and had been at loose ends when En Sabah Nur dropped by Caliban’s.

In retrospect, not a whole lot of conscious thought had gone into her actions at all. Instinct had put a weapon at his throat before he could do more than posture. She was used to meting out swift justice to anyone who threatened the stability of their underground network. Not because she gave a damn about the flood of mutant refugees escaping from circuses, the black market, or fight clubs but because sometimes it helped her and her business partners to move unobtrusively, without using her vortices. Besides, she wasn’t a fucking taxi company.

But up close it had quickly become apparent that En Sabah Nur wasn’t a garden-variety troublemaker, with none of the usual demands for money or safe passage ahead of everyone else. The aura of ancient strength about him spoke for itself even before he’d demonstrated his own powers by amplifying hers. She’d almost nicked him with her blade after all when the shock of it hit her system. No words for a high like that—and he hadn’t needed any to convince her, either, with her powers surging and the promise of more juice if she stuck with him. As a next gig, it beat the last one for sure. She’d gone from intrigued to enthralled so fast it made her head rush; the next thing she really remembered was a dingy warehouse and a sad lumberjack cursing at them.

And the rest was history. Literally.

All of which would have sounded absurd if anyone had asked her to explain her actions that day, but since she’d very deliberately surrounded herself with people who wouldn’t dare, it had never come up.

Of course, there were downsides to inspiring fear-induced loyalty in one’s subordinates. It was lonely and boring, for starters. And if she’d been less starved for company she probably would have been alarmed instead of secretly delighted when Magneto and the kid with silver hair appeared out of nowhere in her office on a (lonely, boring) Tuesday afternoon.

As she leaned back in her chair and propped her feet up on her desk, she wondered idly if she should be afraid. Magneto looked infinitely better than he had the last time she’d seen him. It was in his appearance, neatly brushed hair and a smart suit—he wasn’t bad-looking, when he wasn’t traumatized and hidden under bulky armor—but also something less tangible. He seemed more grounded, still fierce and focused but less desperate. Men like him were rarely at peace but something had happened since Cairo that had made him pull himself together. And he looked like he’d come to talk, not kill her. She pressed pause on being afraid for the moment.

“Well, this is a surprise,” she said.

A corner of Magneto’s mouth twitched upward, almost a smirk. “The nice kind?”

“Depends. You here to finish what happened in Egypt?”

“I thought it _was_ finished.”

She pondered that. It sounded promising. “‘I come in peace,’ huh?”

“In a way. We have a job that could use your skillset.”

Psylocke burst out laughing before she could think better of it. Nervous energy, maybe—or relief that things weren’t going immediately south, or gratitude that finally something interesting had happened in this back-of-nowhere shithole. She translated, “You need my help.”

“I need a favor,” Magneto corrected. “Repayable with a favor from me, should you need it down the line.”

“A favor from Magneto. Now that does sound like valuable currency.”

“Don’t call him that. It’s not his name,” the kid with silver hair broke in. His voice seemed louder for how unexpected it was and Psylocke turned a curious eye on him. She’d barely given him half a glance at first, had missed that the way he stuck close to Magneto was out of protectiveness and not fear. There was something different there too, something she couldn’t put her finger on.

“Peter,” Magneto reprimanded, without much heat behind it.

“Hello, _Peter._ We haven’t met officially,” Psylocke said. The kid scowled at her and she smirked as she turned back to the other man. “That’s right. You’re going by Erik Lehnsherr again these days, aren’t you? I’ve seen the press conferences.”

“What did you think?”

“Impressive. You’re okay when you’re in your right mind and give a shit,” she admitted. It didn’t cost much to tell the truth.

“Unfortunately the correlation between reception and results is not as strong as one might hope. We’ve reached a point that calls for more direct action.”

“And you’ve put too much effort into reclaiming your good name to sully it now, so you’re hoping I’ll step in and do the dirty work?”

Fine, she was baiting him, but Magneto—Lehnsherr now, she supposed—seemed more amused than offended. She’d only seen that toothy grin a few times on TV when reporters asked especially moronic questions. Up close and in person it was less a smile and more like a wolf baring its fangs. But instead of taking the bait he said lightly, “Not quite. I’ll do my part. And with luck no one’s good name will be sullied—not mine, and not yours. I know how much your reputation means to you. Wouldn’t want it to get out that you were capable of a good deed.”

“You’re trading a favor for a _good deed_?”

“For a generous definition of the term.”

“Tell me you’re not about to ask me to testify in Xavier’s trial. You know I won’t do that. It’s a non-starter.”

“Hadn’t even crossed my mind,” Lehnsherr said, and she could tell that was the truth.

“Okay then.” She let her boots hit the ground loudly and leaned forward over her desk instead, past the point of pretending she wasn’t at least curious. “Let’s have it.”

 _It_ was…nothing she’d seen coming, that was for sure. _A risk_ was putting it kindly; one mistake and _a fucking disaster_ would be more accurate. For global geopolitical stability, not just the X-Men personally. It took all her self control to keep her expression blank and not give away—with applause, maybe—that she was on board immediately. She wasn’t going to surrender the upper hand so fast now that she had it and felt unabashed glee that she could make Lehnsherr and his little protégé stew for a bit.

Truth was she’d watched Xavier’s trial unfold with a mix of disdain and outrage that one of the world’s most powerful mutants was submitting to the pathetic, petulant whims of the broken American judicial system. He had a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the case, the guilty verdict was practically a done deal, but the farce would stretch on because the government had no idea what to do with him after it was all over. He’d certainly never have access to his powers again—if they were still even intact, to hear Lehnsherr tell it—and that kind of waste made Psylocke furious. She’d thought once or twice about freeing him herself, just to get him out of the government’s hands. There was no bigger waste of time and talent than martyrdom. It had been true for Lehnsherr after Dallas; it was true for Xavier now.

She’d held off getting involved because what good did it do her, jump-starting a shitstorm she’d then be trapped in the middle of? People with power should have it and use it, but Xavier had made his choice to play along, to let the humans call the shots. Let him live with the consequences, no matter how bad a taste it left in her mouth.

Except if they did it Lehnsherr’s way there’d be no shitstorm. No one would know, Xavier would be safe, Mystique-as-Xavier would buy them time to figure out a new strategy…not to mention that with her out of the way the position of right-hand woman would be wide open. Odds were Lehnsherr would be a lot less invested in this lame mutant-human reconciliation narrative if she could point at Xavier and say, “Look what they did to him.” If his actions in Cairo hadn’t said enough about his emotional investment in a man he’d fought longer than they’d ever been friends, Lehnsherr was giving it all away now, trying to appear businesslike and casual but unable to hide his worry. That was promising too, from Psylocke’s perspective. It always helped to know what made a man tick, and where to apply pressure if she needed leverage.

“It’s an interesting offer, but I don’t know,” she said when he’d talked himself out, which didn’t take terribly long. “As you can see I’ve already got a job.”

“Yeah, it looks _super_ fun,” Peter said sarcastically.

“It’s a slow day,” Psylocke said, even though it wasn’t really. The kid was right. She’d swooped in and become invaluable to the fledgling Turkish government as it was being formed, but that was two months ago. Now the conflict on the ground was all but settled and the focus was on forming a corps of diplomats to represent a country whose legitimacy would be in dispute indefinitely. She liked the idea of having an army at her beck and call, but diplomats? That took patience and planning. Psylocke preferred instant gratification. Really the only thing she like about the Turks was their coffee, but since that was one more than the number of things she usually liked about the people she worked with she hadn’t complained. If there was a better offer on the table, though…

From the sharp look Lehnsherr gave her, he’d probably guessed a good bit of her thought process there. Which meant it wouldn’t be hard for him to figure out that she was posturing just to mess with him.

“If it’s a matter of compensation then perhaps we can come to an agreement on more mercenary grounds,” he said. “Say, $50,000 for twenty-four hours of your time, with the understanding that your active involvement should take no more than a few minutes?”

Psylocke knew she was gaping, but her poker face wasn’t _that_ good. “Holy shit. 50K for a few minutes of work is tough to beat.”

“Is that a yes?”

Lehnsherr had been in her office for less than five minutes. She had planned to draw this out for longer, to really get on his nerves just to show she could, but why bother when the decision was already made and she was actually starting to look forward to the gig?

“Fine, I guess I can spare a day,” she sighed.

Lehnsherr’s smile was smaller this time, but sincere. “Excellent.”

“Can we trust you?” Peter asked suspiciously. He’d clearly already decided not to and was asking only to hear her answer in the negative.

So she didn’t. “To get the job done? Yes. As long as I get paid, you get your professor back. But if he’s in bad shape that’s not on me. The rest of it’s your problem. This is a basic retrieval op in my book.”

 That last part wasn’t strictly true—there was absolutely no way she was going to bounce right when things got good—but she didn’t feel the need to mention that just yet. Lehnsherr seemed satisfied; he stepped forward and she stood up and they shook hands, while Peter remained standing at a distance with his arms crossed and a surly expression on his face. She gave him a cheerful grin just to be obnoxious.

“Consider yourself on the clock, then,” Lehnsherr said. “This is a time-sensitive job.”

Psylocke double-checked the katanas on her back, the knives strapped inside her boots, the wad of cash and selected passports she always kept on her just in case. “I’m all set, boss. Your twenty-four hours start now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> rescue next chapter whaaaaa
> 
> (also sorry i haven't gotten to comments, responding to them asap! they are much appreciated as always)


	14. Recess

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> rescue time whaaa

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not that a longer-than-usual chapter makes up for a two-month delay, but...here's a longer than usual chapter
> 
> (the section heads are a countdown of the 24 hours Erik hired Psylocke for, the POV of that section, and the actual time of day. that seemed *really cool* in theory, sorry if it's confusing)

24\. Raven. 9 p.m. 

“I don’t need to show  _you_ to the armory, do I?” Raven asked, eying the swords strapped to Psylocke’s back and pinpointing the three other weapons she had on her with no effort at all. As they sized each other up, the last of the purple psionic energy dissipated into thin air, leaving no sign that seconds before there’d been a vortex to the other side of the world in the middle of the kitchen. Peter looked a little stunned and Erik looked like he was trying to pretend he wasn’t too.

“I’m good,” Psylocke said. Her grin might have been described as flirtatious if there hadn’t been something too sharp underneath it. Raven knew a warning when she saw one.

“Relax,” she said. “I’m not going to steal your toys. Come on, we’re waiting in the other room.”

Erik had shaken off the vortex’s effects and sent Peter away by the time they reached the library. While she was waiting for them Raven had built a fire, dimmed the lights, and set out a decanter of something imported and expensive beside the mountain of newspaper clippings and files they’d accumulated since Charles’s imprisonment. Not a board or screw in the mansion was the same, but for a moment there she’d felt fifteen again, puttering about and wasting time when she knew she was born to take action.

But there was nothing to do until Moira and Hank came back from New York, except channel Charles’s mother and offer her guests a drink. So here they were, her and Erik and Psylocke—strangers, friends, enemies, or all three—and the whole thing felt so absurd she wanted to laugh. Or punch something.

Psylocke was the only one who helped herself to the scotch. She held the tumbler up after, admiring the glint of warm light off the cut crystal. The look she shot them was a little impressed and a lot amused, and Raven’s desire to punch something suddenly had a focus. She took a few deep breaths, forced herself to calm down.

“Fancy digs,” Psylocke said. She threw herself down in an armchair near the fire. “I didn’t get to see much of it last time I was here.”

“For such a fast visit you left us with a hell of a lot of redecorating to do.”

Psylocke’s smirk widened. “I like to make a strong first impression.”

Erik opened his mouth. Then he hesitated and closed it again, a strange expression on his face. It was barely perceptible—Psylocke didn’t even notice—but after all this time Raven could read him like the books he thought she didn’t know he read the kids before bed. The tension broke when she started laughing.

“You were about to say ‘behave, girls,’ weren’t you?” she said.

Caught, Erik shrugged. “Habit.”

“Our youngest students are sisters, four and five. They can be rambunctious,” Raven explained.

“You really have been doing this, then. Running Xavier’s school for him.”

“All of us have,” Raven answered quickly. She could see Erik tensing up, ready to get defensive. The only button easier to push than his guilt that he wasn’t out there fighting for mutantkind like Magneto used to was his guilt about his wife and daughter, and even Psylocke wasn’t brave enough to go there.

“On a strictly interim basis,” Erik insisted mulishly. “Only until he comes back.”

“And you decided to speed up that timetable because what, you got tired of babysitting kids and the press at the same time? Or did you really have faith that the American judicial system would treat Xavier fairly?”

“Enough to lose it.”

Psylocke’s smirk fell away, became something soft and surprisingly sincere. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

Erik shrugged again, this time with unmistakable dismissiveness. He didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t ever want to talk about it, Raven knew, because she’d tried and been rebuffed half a dozen times since he’d stormed into the house the night after Charles’s opening statement and told her it was over, they needed a new strategy, because Charles looked like death warmed over and the whole thing was a setup—all the public support or moral high ground wouldn’t make a bit of difference. The verdict was a done deal. _I promised him I’d protect all of you. I promised I wouldn’t run,_ he’d told her with that familiar cold fury. _But I did_ not _promise it at the expense of his life._

Raven hadn’t argued for a second. _Fine. But violence is our last resort. There must be some way to outsmart them._

“So whose brilliant idea was this?” Psylocke asked, like she could read Raven’s mind. Hell, maybe she could—Raven didn’t know a lot about her powers except that they used psionic energy, and that was _like_ telepathy, wasn’t it?

“Switching places with him was mine. Bringing you on board was Erik’s. I wouldn’t have trusted you for a second, but he said you weren’t the type to hold a grudge.” Raven paused, significantly. “Like I am.”

Psylocke did not seem nearly as intimidated by that as Raven would have liked. Was she losing her edge? She hadn’t been threatening many people lately besides teenagers and reporters, and the Ororo-esque hero worship that still seemed to infect everyone around her meant that she hadn’t even needed to do much of that. She found herself wondering what it would have been like to have Psylocke around for a bit—or at least longer than the 24 hours until she took Charles’s place in jail—with far less reluctance than she’d assumed would accompany such a thought. She’d never had many equals, once she’d shaken off the bad habits of Charles’s needy, whiny baby sister.

“I didn’t mean that you lacked conviction,” Erik was explaining. “I thought that you wouldn’t let your emotions keep you from taking advantage of an opportunity, that’s all.”

“50k for a standard B&E isn’t an opportunity, it’s an early birthday present. It’s Christmas in August, it’s a no-brainer—”

“Hey, just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s beneath you. You better be taking this seriously,” Raven snapped. “We only get one shot. If shit goes sideways and they find out how badly they’ve been underestimating us, they’ll lock him away behind so many kinds of security we’ll never even find him again, much less rescue him.”

“I’ll do my part. But 95% of this thing hinges on _you,_ doesn’t it, so I’d be worried about myself if I were you.”

Since those were the exact thoughts she’d been trying _not_ to think, Raven had no snappy retort ready. Maybe Psylocke felt like that had been a low blow or sensed that she’d overstepped, because she seemed apologetic and didn’t try to keep the conversation on its feet. There was nothing for it after that but to sit in awkward silence.

Hank and Moira really couldn’t get here soon enough.

* * *

 

 20. Moira. 1 a.m. 

Moira unrolled the blueprints on the table and anchored the four corners with never-opened books from Charles’s desk. She’d finally acquired them earlier that day after some judicious bribery to a retired electrician, who’d dragged out for days what should have taken half a day at max. As soon as he’d finally turned the plans over Moira had booked it back to Westchester with Hank muttering from the passenger seat that they were already behind schedule when he wasn’t telling her that she was driving like a maniac until she’d snapped at him to make up his mind.

“Tell me to speed up or slow down, you can’t do both,” she’d said, and he’d apologized sheepishly. Their silences were usually comfortable but everyone was tense now.

As Erik, Raven, Hank, and Psylocke leaned in to see the blueprints, Moira pointed at the notation in the top left corner: Sing Sing Correctional Facility.

“There’s obviously been a change of plans,” she said. Hank snorted at the accidental pun and she added with a wry smile for his benefit, “Literally. We thought that when Gagliardi called a recess over the holidays Charles would be moved back to the Pentagon. Hank and I found out earlier this week that’s not the case. Several sources have informed us that he’ll remain in the isolation ward constructed for him at Sing Sing instead.”

Erik had been the one to take the call from her with that unexpected development half an hour before he and Peter left to recruit Psylocke. He hadn’t reacted well to the news at the time and he didn’t seem much happier about it now. He’d reluctantly agreed with Moira’s desperately optimistic viewpoint that maybe this was a good thing—security at Sing Sing would be lax compared to the Pentagon, the surveillance equipment not nearly as sophisticated, less attentive guards who knew next to nothing about mutants and would underestimate them. But the eleventh-hour upheaval threw everyone off and Erik in particular hated surprises.

Especially ones that meant they were walking blind into a facility no one had ever stepped foot in or even seen a map of before this moment. Any new additions, replacements or alterations in the blueprints and they’d be fucked. At least they knew the layout of the Pentagon.

And of course Erik had other objections too.

“How do we know these sources of yours aren’t FBI plants?” he said suspiciously.

“We did our homework, Erik,” Hank said, as Moira tried not to roll her eyes. “Every one we spoke to was unjustly fired from employment in the federal prison system and has a longstanding grudge against the government because of it. No lingering loyalties. We can trust them.”

Erik scoffed, clearly contemptuous of the idea that he should be bestowing his trust so easily upon strangers, but not with the bitterness he’d once had. And he moved on quickly, instead of obsessing over something he couldn’t do anything about. Not for the first time, Moira wondered what the hell she’d missed around the mansion while she’d been shuttling back and forth between Washington and New York.

“No one knows why the move to the Pentagon was abandoned at the last minute,” she went on. “Could be any number of reasons. Requisitions that didn’t come through, wanting less hassle around the holidays, the feds and the courts butting heads over jurisdiction. But we also have to at least consider the possibility that Charles is not in a state to be transported anywhere.”

“You think he could be in really bad shape?” Raven asked.

Moira had been trying to avoid that thought, actually, but it kept creeping into her mind like an oil slick, insidious and persistent. “I don’t want to. But he was going downhill fast and we haven’t seen him for days…we have to prepare for it, just in case.”

“Prepare for it how?” Psylocke asked. “We’ve only got a couple of seconds between when Lehnsherr knocks out the power and when the backup generator kicks in. It’s already barely enough time to get in, make the switch, and get out. I can’t bring medical supplies with me, and I can’t take any with us either without giving away the game.”

“Just be careful moving him, okay? I’m worried about his spine. Create the vortex from the infirmary, I’ll have everything waiting just in case,” Hank said.

Psylocke still looked doubtful. “And the speedy kid isn’t helping us…why?”

Moira’s gaze automatically flitted sideways to Erik, sensed more than saw the thunderous reaction building under his cool exterior, and barely kept her sigh of relief internal when Raven jumped in first.

“Same reason we’re not using the kid who teleports instead of you. They’re good kids but they’re still only beginning their training. This is a critical mission, not a learning opportunity. I’m in charge of them so it’s my call and I’m not taking a chance that Kurt jumps off-target or Peter loses focus or Jean brainwashes all of Ossining. They’ve done their parts. Now it’s on the grownups, and the fewer of us involved the better. Is that a problem?”

“Not at all.” Psylocke shrugged and jerked her head in Erik’s direction. “I’m just here to do what he tells me.”

“And I’m telling you to do what she tells you,” Erik said.

“Consider it done, then, boss—es.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, okay,” Moira said, trying not to look sideways at Hank; she was reasonably sure he’d be wearing the same long-suffering expression she was. Getting Raven and Erik in sync with each other was hard enough, given their complicated history—still trying to sort out their new power dynamics, they had an almost compulsive tendency to push each other’s buttons in ways that went from gentle teasing to bitter recrimination and only the gravity of the situation had forced them to pull it together. Now there was Psylocke, the new kid on the playground who introduced herself by pulling pigtails and seemed happy to exploit tension wherever she saw it.

Which in this metaphor made Moira the teacher and these so-called “advanced humans” super-powered ten year olds.

Sounded about right.

But even in less-than-ideal circumstances and with deficient resources, she’d make it work. She always had.

“So the power grid is on the southeast side of the complex—”

* * *

 

12\. Erik. 9 a.m. 

The kitchen floor was chilly on his bare feet. Someone had left a window open—probably Scott or Ororo sneaking a cigarette late at night and forgetting to close it after. Outside the dew had frozen every blade of grass in its own coat of ice and the lawn had crunched under his shoes when he’d gone running earlier. Erik warmed his hands around a mug of scalding black coffee, used his powers to tip the bowl of pancake batter over the griddle with a spatula floating at the ready.

The others were still in bed. Moira’s strategy session had lasted until 3 a.m. and ended with Hank recommending they all get as much rest as they could now before they reconvened the next afternoon. But Erik had never had much luck with sleep the night before a mission; he’d only managed a few restless hours before admitting defeat. A run, a shower, and his first cup of coffee later, he’d decided he might as well do something useful and make breakfast for the students. The smallest ones should be thundering downstairs any minute now, too excited about a day off to sleep through it, and the older ones, Raven’s so-called X-Men, not long after that.

“Tomorrow is a very special day,” he’d explained to the children the night before. “Think of it like a holiday. The adults have an important job to do so your classes and training are canceled and you can have the whole day free as long as you’re on your best behavior for Scott and Jean, okay?”

Nothing about Charles, because if he told them that Professor Xavier was coming back and something went wrong during the mission he’d have half a dozen distraught children to manage in addition to his own emotions. It was a tossup which would be less pleasant for the rest of the house, him or them.

There was a pile of pancakes building on a serving platter by the time he heard footsteps coming down the stairs, too soft to be the kids after all—almost silent, in fact. Only one person in the mansion moved with a thief’s stealth.

“Good morning, Ororo,” he said when he sensed she was in the doorway. “Help yourself.”

She hopped up on the counter next to him and ate the top pancake on the pile plain, ignoring the stack of plates and butter and syrup on the table.

“Ready for the big day?”

“Impatient for it, yes. Prepared for it? No.”

Sometimes he thought he should have disliked Ororo, resented her for seeing him at his weakest while they were both Horsemen, but instead he always found it strangely easy to talk to her. She was sharp but nonjudgmental. He was glad she’d stuck around after Cairo. At first she hadn’t had much choice, herded around with the rest of them through detention and debriefings and then back to Westchester where they were put under something that resembled but wasn’t quite house arrest—but she could have taken off as soon as security was relaxed. This wasn’t the Xavier Institute the way it was supposed to be, a school she might have enjoyed. But she’d stayed anyway. Maybe Raven had said something; Erik thought there wasn’t a lot Ororo wouldn’t do for her hero.

“You should take us with you,” she said. A brief pause. “Well, some of us.” Another. “Well, me. I can knock out power to a building just as easy as you can.”

“If you do my job, what am I supposed to do?” Erik said, mustering his driest humor to hide that the idea of her or any of the kids in the middle of this made him want to melt all the silverware. Then, because Ororo was as susceptible to flattery as any teenager who was secretly insecure, he added, “I can’t play favorites, you know that. And even if I could, we need you here to defend the children and the school.”

She heaved an exaggerated sigh and ate another pancake. With food in her mouth, her words came out thoughtful yet garbled.

“I hope I get a chance to know him. Your professor. That you’re all so willing to do this crazy thing for him…he must be something very special. More than just a powerful mutant.”

“He is.”

She was silent for a minute, and Erik got the sense she was building to a question she’d had for a long time. Finally she ventured, “I saw how you turned away when he spoke into your head back then, before we came and took him away from here. You didn’t want anyone to know. Were you trying to get rid of him or protect him?”

“I don’t know. Both, I suspect. He’s never learned that he’s safer if he just leaves me alone, the idiot.”

There was a lecture that went along with that thought but it wasn’t for Ororo. In fact he had quite a few lectures saved up for Charles: besides “you can’t protect your children _and_ me, stop trying,” there was a variation on the old “don’t trust the humans” with a new “some humans can be manipulated to be useful” clause, a “mutantkind needs you as leader, not a martyr,” a “utilize all your resources, including ( _especially)_ the ones that give you an unfair advantage,” plus a “your syllabi are atrocious” lecture with accompanying notes on Semitic languages and modernist poets.

Ororo had to snap her fingers in front of his face to make him realize he was burning the current batch of pancakes. He flipped them into the trashcan instead of onto the plate and started again while she said, in a tone of voice that indicated she was repeating herself, “Apocalypse would have come for him anyway. You know that, right? He was looking for powerful mutants—he would have found out about Charles Xavier eventually.”

Erik didn’t say anything. He knew logically that was true. And he had a feeling that if he’d been under En Sabah Nur’s power for much longer he might have been lost in that insidious bled of rage and despair forever. But if Charles hadn’t been in his head, trying to save him _again_ —if Charles had had more time to understand the threat En Sabah Nur presented and formulate a plan—there might have been less carnage and Alex Summers might still be alive and Charles might be lauded as the hero he was instead of scapegoated for something he hadn’t done. The guilt persisted despite logic, as it always had done.

Some of that must have shown on his face because Ororo gave him a bracing smile as she hopped down from the counter. “I just don’t want to see your mind dwelling on the ways you think you’ve wronged him in the past when your thoughts should be on the future. Especially today.”

“How old are you, again?” Erik said. He tried to keep his tone dry instead of bitter but she still hesitated and he added quickly, “You were right to stay here. You’ll be a good teacher one day.”

In the two quiet minutes between when she left and when six hyperactive children came barreling into the kitchen, he had just enough time to play her last words over again in his head. _Your thoughts should be on the future._ Not the way Charles spoke of the future—in decades and generations, a rosy vision of mutantkind’s potential spouted to anyone who would listen—but the immediate future, now, the coming twenty-four hours. The immediacy of it hit him suddenly. Unless something went unexpectedly, terribly wrong, Charles would be with him—them—again in twelve hours. That gnawing uncertainty that had haunted Erik for months, the conviction that something awful was happening to him at any given moment, would be assuaged. One way or another.

He just had to make it through the day.

* * *

 

3\. Hank. 8 p.m.

“Let’s see… ventilator, incubator, defibrillator…”

Hank flipped to the next page of his checklist.

“X-ray machine, MRI, CT scanner, EEG and EKG monitors…”

Next page.

“Anesthetic, sedatives, bandages, catheters, oxygen mask, transfusion kit…”

He knew how 97% of these things worked and could puzzle out the rest of it via diagrams and complicated instruction manuals, but there was a difference between theoretical knowledge and practical application. It was all brand new equipment, delivered to the infirmary off his lab as soon as both had been rebuilt, and most of it not even opened or tested. They’d had no health emergencies aside from some skinned knees, allergies, and a few training accidents since Cairo. 

Better to be over- than underprepared, though. Moira was right—they had no way of knowing what kind of shape Charles was in. And who knew what kind of weird machines those scientists in the Pentagon had cooked up to suppress his telepathy and monitor him after that? Even this arsenal might not do the job. Luckily Hank thought fast on his feet and could probably jimmy together just about anything eventually, but if time was a factor—

It was no good worrying about the what-ifs. Determinedly, Hank flipped to the checklist’s last page, which contained what would have been called the nuclear option if, all things considered, that hadn’t seemed in astonishingly bad taste.

It sat on the table in front of him, still with that cracked-clay look that made it look like it would fall apart at any second, straight out of…well, all the shittiest parts of his life, really. Name a traumatizing moment and it probably had one of these helmets in it, varying by the decade but all reliably painful, aesthetically and emotionally. This particular one he’d scooped off the White House Lawn in 1973 and kept in a safe deposit box at a bank in New York City—one of those places where old money names like Xavier bought a lot of discretion. As recent events had proved, the mansion itself wasn’t the safest place to keep valuables.

He’d have much rather let it collect dust in there indefinitely, but Moira had pointed out—carefully—that it was better to have the helmet and not use it than need it and not have it.

“Keep it out of sight and try not to even think about it,” she’d said. “We _want_ him to use his telepathy again. But if he does more than read our minds—if he panics or lashes out— _someone_ has to hit him with a sedative, and that person can’t be drooling on the floor like everyone else, okay?”

“You really have thought about the worst-case scenario, haven’t you?” Hank had said, a little queasily.

“Sometimes I feel like my entire life has been worst-case scenarios so yes, I take them into consideration.”

From someone else, like Charles circa-1968, that would have sounded whiny and self-pitying, but Moira didn’t like self-pity. It took extreme duress to bring out the morose streak that lurked under her wry sense of humor. She had to be very drunk or very tired to admit that in fact she hadn’t seen her life playing out like this, and Hank thought he was probably the only one at the mansion who knew that side of her even existed.

He liked that idea, that Moira knew her secrets were safe with him.

She was probably at the prison by now. No one going off by themselves tonight, they’d agreed. Since Raven and Psylocke had to go in together and Hank had to man the infirmary, that made Moira Erik’s partner by default. After the whole group synced their watches, he and Moira had zoomed off on the back of a hastily-purchased used Harley an hour ago, which Hank wasn’t happy about but also saw the necessity of. It was only a twenty-minute drive to Sing Sing; they’d get there early, stake the place out. Erik would get a feel for the electrical grid, pinpoint its weaknesses, and then, at 9:00 exactly, he’d knock the whole thing out, giving Psylocke and Raven their two minutes.

Hank had bigger things to worry about—like sterilizing half this equipment—but it was hard not to wonder (or worry, maybe) what it was like as the two of them waited in some industrial alleyway right now. Decades had chilled whatever animosity Erik had felt for Moira, though how much of that animosity was actually misplaced guilt had always been up for interpretation in Hank’s opinion, and old grudges were a luxury none of them could afford, post-apocalypse.

But for Moira it hadn’t been decades since Cuba. Charles had given her back her memories in the exact shape he’d taken them; none of the images or emotions were blunted by time or blurred telepathically to help them reintegrate into her mind. Cuba was only a few months ago for her. Her guilt for causing Charles’s paralysis was as fresh as her anger at Erik for being so oblivious of his surroundings. She distrusted Raven, who’d left her brother to bleed out on that beach, but struggled to match those memories with the Raven who’d broken from Magneto’s fiery rhetoric in Washington, D.C. She was furious at Charles for violating her mind and stealing memories without her consent, but that fury was tempered by regret and a lingering girlish crush, both of which belonged in the past but felt like the present. Reconciling what had really happened in Cuba with the work she’d done on mutants for the past two decades herself was like finding the missing piece of a puzzle only to find that it changed the whole picture.

It was probably for the best that she and Erik hadn’t spent much time together since Cairo, Hank figured. He knew it was hard for her that Erik got to be the good guy—in the public eye, anyway—and shake off the mantle of Magneto just as she remembered first-hand the worst thing he’d ever done. There was a lot she still had to come to terms with before she could forgive him. Or herself.

With baggage like that, stilted small talk was about the best they could hope for.

Hank took a deep breath, refocused. At this level of anxiety his thoughts had a tendency to run wild, but he wrenched them back under control. The helmet went on the top shelf of a storage locker in the corner of the room; then he flexed his left arm and picked up the syringe waiting on the table. He had a lot of delicate machinery to calibrate before Raven and Psylocke arrived, and these claws had to go.

* * *

 

2\. Raven. 8:57 p.m. 

Raven had spent such a long time acting like she was fearless that it had almost become true. Not much threw her off these days and she hadn’t wasted time second-guessing herself since she left this house for good. Once she made up her mind to do something, anything but total commitment was a waste of time and effort. She was done self-sabotaging.

Which was fine, since Psylocke seemed perfectly willing to help. They sat at the wide lab table while Hank scurried around in a flurry of last-minute preparations and Psylocke asked one uncomfortable, anxiety-inducing question after another.

“So how much detail can you replicate, exactly? The skin, but what about damage to it? If he’s bleeding or has bruises or broken bones—”

“Surface injuries are easy. Anything visible to the naked eye.” Raven paused and switched to her old standby form, the pretty blonde one, then shifted only the center of her face to mimic the crushed cartilage and clotted blood of a badly broken nose. It must have been graphic because Psylocke looked grossed out at first before curiosity got the better of her and she leaned back in, inspecting the detail but making the wise decision not to actually prod Raven’s face.

“Nice work there, Mystique.” 

It was a genuine compliment and Raven acknowledged it with a bloody grin before she shifted back to her usual self.

“The tricky part is going to be if he has an infection or illness—something a machine can see but I can’t.”

Most of the two minutes Erik bought them would go to eliminating as many of those possibilities as time allowed. She’d need to assume not just Charles’s general form but all his body's current idiosyncrasies, every imperfection whether it was natural or inflicted, and that meant an excruciatingly detailed examination. Cuts, scrapes, freckles, puncture wounds, the heat of fever or the iciness of bad circulation: she’d have to notice and mimic them all. If she got lucky there’d be a medical chart nearby to use as a cheat sheet, but she couldn’t count on that. Couldn’t count on him being awake, either, so she might have to guess his current speech patterns and state of mind, but surely erratic behavior wouldn’t be too suspicious under the circumstances. (There was even a shameful part of her that wished he would be unconscious—he’d only try to stop her if he was awake, and she couldn’t have her brother fucking up his own rescue).

And then, of course, there was the paralysis. Raven couldn’t replicate a severed spine—not that she would ever have wanted to—so she would just have to pretend. Twitch so much as a single toe and she’d give the game away.

It was all starting to pile up and seem…more than a little daunting. Like maybe this whole thing wasn’t such a great idea after all.

And somehow Psylocke hadn’t run out of questions yet. “And if they’re drugging him?”

“Anything in him is going in me too. But my metabolism’s fast. As long as I can keep my head clear enough to hold his form, I’ll be fine.”

“What about—”

“How are we doing, Hank?” Raven said, a little too loudly.

Normally Hank would have caught the panicked edge to her voice and come to her rescue, but he was drawing various liquids into a series of syringes on a metal tray and only muttered back, “Almost there…”

“Ninety seconds, doc,” Psylocke said.

“How about you?” Raven asked. “This vortex of yours isn’t going to lead to the wrong side of the compound, is it?”

“Blueprints up here.” Psylocke tapped her temple. “Of course if he’s not _in_ the isolation chamber on that map we’re shit out of luck. There’s nothing I can do about that.”

“So we abort the mission and think of something else.”

Psylocke shrugged dismissively. “Well, have fun with that.”

At thirty seconds to nine they stood up and went to the center of the lab, just in front of the medical bed so Charles wouldn’t have to be moved more than a few feet.  While Psylocke looked calm to the point of boredom, Raven shook out the tension in her muscles, straightened her back and squared her shoulders like she was about to start a sprint and not simply step through a vortex. Like the night before when she’d lit a fire in the library she had the strange sense that time had turned cyclical, only now instead of fifteen she was twenty-one and on a beach in Cuba—it was the lynchpin of her life, that fucking beach, her greatest regret and her moment of greatest strength—and Charles’s life was in danger. Her stupid, irritating, selfish big brother needed help that he would never ask for because he was an _idiot_ but this time…

This time she was going to help him, whether he liked it or not.

She wasn’t less afraid, but suddenly the fear was no longer paralyzing. Whatever happened, it was better that it happened to her than Charles. This wasn’t her first undercover operation or deliberate imprisonment for the cause; she’d gotten in and out of enough scrapes to turn her brother’s hair white, if he’d still had any. She could do this.

She looked over her shoulder at Hank. Goodbyes had never been her strong suit, but he was staring at her like he’d never see her again and it felt wrong to say nothing, so she said the first thing that came into her head.

“Take care of him, okay?”

Hank pushed his glasses up his nose and gave her a bracing smile. “I will. Take care of yourself, Raven.”

Three piercing alarms began shrieking before she could respond.

Nine o’clock.

Show time.

* * *

 

1\. Charles. 9 p.m. 

He spent a lot of time drifting these days. In and out of consciousness, back and forth in time, between memories and fantasies…it was nice to have movement of _some_ kind when his body was confined to a series of identical hospital beds. Wheelchairs too, sometimes, but the doctors came to him now and there were no more appointments at ominously empty labs to test the suppression device. The one he wore permanently worked perfectly, they congratulated themselves over his head. He supposed they were right. He couldn’t hear anyone’s thoughts at all, not even a whisper, and his temples didn’t even itch or bleed anymore.

_You’re part of the cutting edge of scientific advancement. Progress is a beautiful thing, isn’t it, Dr. Xavier?_

There was a mocking edge to the way people said his name now that he didn’t like, but since he rarely responded to their questions they had no way to know it irritated him. Conversation was difficult now. He’d always been such an extrovert before, so eager to connect, to speak to and learn from as many people as possible. Now simple answers felt like an impossibly arduous task. Sometimes he was too tired, other times he was too confused, and at least half the time he didn’t even realize he’d been spoken to until long after the other person had given up and left the room. He heard the words, understood them eventually, but they seemed to emanate from nowhere and dissipate into the air like mist, with meaning registering later if it came at all.

That was the problem with telepathic suppression. People without minds weren’t people. They were like robots or characters on television. Mannequins that moved. No matter how many times he reminded himself to _pay attention_ his focus slid off them, even when their mouths were moving or their arms were gesticulating at him. They had all the hallmarks of any other inanimate object in the room—he might as well have paid close attention to the heart rate monitor or the plastic chair in the corner. Since it didn’t seem to matter much if he responded or not, he’d stopped worrying about it over time.

It was so much nicer to drift.

Still, he wasn’t so out of it that he didn’t notice when the lights when out. That was unusual enough to inspire vague curiosity; there’d never been a power outage before. All the machines he was hooked up to had gone dark and the lamps that stayed on even at night were dead. He blinked a few times, just to make sure he hadn’t closed his eyes and forgotten about it.

And there, the light was back—but a different light, purple this time, and only from one corner of the room—and shapes were moving inside it, then through it, backlit by the purple light so their faces were obscured and he couldn’t identify them. It was even harder to pay attention to shadow-people than to normal people and he felt his gaze drawn back to the purple light, trying to remember where he’d seen something like that before—

Then one of the shadows _touched him_ and he flinched away with an unhappy, inarticulate noise. Touch was real, and it had meant pain for a long time now. The shadow hesitated for a moment and then grabbed for him again, relentless and uncaring when he began to thrash weakly against it, only instead of jamming needles into him or immobilizing his flailing upper body it just sort of…moved him around randomly. His arms were lifted up and down, his head turned side to side, he was rolled onto his stomach and then back again. He kept struggling, more out of confusion than pain, so agitated he missed the harsh whispers that came from the shadows.

“Calm down, Charles, fuck _,_ I’m trying to help you—”

When hands grabbed his shirt and pulled it over his head he managed his first real scream. It tore at his dry throat and quickly became a choking cough that cut off his cry for help; he tried again as soon as he caught his breath but now he was beginning to hyperventilate. If he could just get in one good shout, maybe someone in the hall would hear him…

 Seeing the prison-issue pants being dragged down his legs was almost worse than feeling it. At some point he stopped fighting and started begging, but his attacker didn’t even pause. There was nothing he could do to stop the assault and his mind was reeling, uncomprehending, barreling towards clinical shock. Why was this _happening,_ who _were_ these people, if he could just access his telepathy for a split second he could defend himself, keep them from doing this—

“Got his clothes, IVs in the left arm, scars in all the right places,” a breathless voice said. “Get him out of here, I’m not sticking a catheter up my brother’s dick in front of you.”

“ _That’s_ the line you won’t cross,” a second voice said dryly.

“Get him _out_!”

“Fine, but you’re missing an accessory.”

“Shit. Okay. Brace yourself, this could get messy.”

There were gentle fingers on either temple, something that felt bizarrely like a kiss on his forehead, and before it even occurred to him as a possibility the fingers had hooked under the suppression device and pulled it free.

Whoever the shadow-people were, they weren’t with the government, because they obviously had no idea what suppression technology entailed or how it was fixed to his head. The device wasn’t designed to be removed at all, and if it had to be it would have required delicacy and perfect focus. As the surgical screws tore through his skin he finally felt it—pain, a vast unbearable wave of it that crashed down on him and swept the whole world away into utter, silent darkness.

Just before he went under he remembered where he’d seen that purple light, but by then it was too late.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> guys i've been salivating over the h/c in the next chapter for so long you don't even KNOW
> 
> still have some comments to respond to but i love you all and i appreciate every one, promise


	15. Redirect Examination

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> wallowin' in dat h/c

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter features zero medical accuracy, about which i have only minimal guilt

“He’s unconscious,” Hank called as Erik literally ran into the lab after breaking every traffic law in existence between Sing Sing and the mansion.

That slowed him down but not much; he was still wide-eyed and breathless when he reached Charles’s bedside. Whatever expression was on his face must have embarrassed Hank, who turned away as if to give them privacy.

For what Erik wasn’t sure, since there was nothing to say or do. Charles was swallowed by the covers pulled up to his shoulders, skeletal and so still Erik put two fingers to the pulse point at his neck just to be certain he was breathing. There was blood oozing from his temples, visible through the bandages wrapped around his head. His heartbeat was very slow—too slow? How was Erik supposed to know? There was a cord trailing from under the blankets to a heart monitor by the bed and no alarms were going off, so—

But there was also a defibrillator on a metal tray at Hank’s elbow. It looked recently-used.

The tray started rattling as Erik tried to control his powers and his breathing at the same time and didn’t really succeed at either.

“His heart stopped,” Hank explained. If he hadn’t sounded so somber—if he’d tried to play down the danger of that to keep Erik calm—he might have ended up pinned to the wall by his neck and left there indefinitely. But he was more shaken than Erik had ever seen him and paradoxically that was what helped.

“Shock of the suppressor being ripped out, I think. I should have paid more attention to that. There were so many variables—for that to be the one that slipped my mind, it’s—”

“Stop blaming yourself,” Erik snapped—to speed the conversation along, not to be comforting. “For how long? How long was he—”

He couldn’t actually bring himself to say the word, or ask the obvious follow-up question. But Hank knew.

“Only a few seconds. Fifteen, twenty at the very most. I only had to use the defibrillator once to bring him back. But even that…and with the shock to his system before that, and the long-term suppression of his powers…permanent neurological damage is a real possibility.” 

Erik nodded but it was automatic, no real comprehension behind it. “And Raven?”

He hadn’t seen Psylocke in the corner and physically startled when she spoke up. “I popped back outside the main complex ten minutes after we left. No commotion.”

“Check again in another half hour.”

He half-expected some obnoxious comment about the job being done or overtime pay, but she just nodded. Under her Mediterranean-tanned skin she seemed paler than usual, maybe a little unsettled by a man’s heart stopping while he was in her arms, and pensive about something. Erik gave her his best “spit it out” glare because looking anywhere but at Charles was almost physically painful. He wasn’t convinced that the body on the bed wouldn’t be gone if he turned away for more than a few seconds.

“Usually I can get a read on mutants with psionic energy,” she said. “His was off the charts and now it’s…well, it’s not baseline, but it’s not far off. Whatever happened in there severely depleted his powers. Maybe just for now, maybe for good. No way to tell.”

 Erik turned back to Hank, started to snap, “Call—”

“Absolutely not.” No sign of the hesitant hovering nerd here; Hank had never been more sure of himself. “Not until he’s had some time to recover. His telepathy’s been through enough and I don’t want Jean in there rummaging around before he’s at least had a _chance_ to wake up naturally. This isn’t like Cairo. Raw power might just make things worse.”

And Erik stood down because…well, the moment called for Magneto’s certainty and Magneto wasn’t available. The only one whose mind wasn’t awash with the static buzz of shock was the ghost of Henryk Gorski, who would have given anything to have the second chance with his family that Erik now had with Charles. Caution was something Henryk would have agreed to; he had deferred to Magda and he would have listened to Hank too. And he’d been a good man, Henryk, until that last unforgiveable failure.

Erik wouldn’t fail Charles like that. Couldn’t, if he wanted to retain any shred of the sanity he’d worked so hard to reestablish over the past few months.

“What can I do?” he asked Hank.

They worked through the night. Hooked Charles up to cutting-edge medical monitoring equipment, made of good strong metal that hummed soothingly against Erik’s mutation. Took down his temperature and blood pressure at frequent intervals, ran tests on his blood for infections only Hank could pronounce. Set up IV drips, one for malnutrition, one antibiotics for his urinary tract infection. That should help the mild fever, Hank said, and stabilize his vitals in a few hours. By the third time they changed the bandages around his head the bleeding had stopped. They watched the heart monitor carefully at first but it beeped on slow and steady, and the EEG beside it too.

Psylocke reported in every half hour, then every hour, each time confirming no suspicious activity outside the prison that might indicate Raven had been discovered. Though he was curious, Erik couldn’t bring himself to ask why she was still here; and helping them, too, not just sticking around for her own amusement. Moira handled the children, told them the professor was back but they had to keep that a secret and that he was very sick and they could help him by thinking happy, quiet thoughts, brought sandwiches and coffee to the lab, joined them after the children were asleep. She was a calm, supportive presence in the corner, not talkative but not bound by the same stricken silence that fell over the area in close proximity to Charles’s bed.

“So the baldness is good for something,” she remarked when Hank attached the EEG’s electrodes to Charles’s bare scalp with a gritty glue that always took several showers to get out of hair.

Hank laughed, even if it sounded more like a surprised cough.

Around 3 a.m. they realized there was nothing more to do. Charles’s temperature and blood pressure were normal. No sign of heart or brain damage that the monitors could catch. Persistent unconsciousness and still-ghastly appearance aside, he seemed…fine. In no danger, at least, which under the circumstances was the same thing.

“You should get some sleep,” Erik said to Hank and Moira. “I’ll watch him for a few hours. I’m not tired.”

“You’ve gotten less sleep than any of us over the past two days,” Hank protested.

Erik shrugged, unimpressed at what might be very generously interpreted as concern on Hank’s part. “Let me rephrase. I’m not tired. I _will_ watch him for a few hours. You should get some sleep while things are quiet.”

“Fine. But call us if anything changes, and there’s another bed right there if you decide to stop being stubborn.”

“Thank you,” Erik said, to make them go away.

And suddenly he was alone with Charles Xavier for the first time in twenty years.

That took a moment to process. No Hank hovering protectively over Charles’s shoulder, no Apocalypse forcing himself into their heads, no irritating hairy mutant from the future chewing unlit cigars in the background. Just the two of them.

Not that Charles appreciated the enormity of the moment. He slept on, corpselike and grotesque. Erik had only seen him a few days ago but the differences were marked. The bruise-purple bags under his eyes had grown bigger and darker; there were deeper lines around his eyes, mouth, and forehead, as if he’d spent so long frowning or grimacing that they’d set in permanently. His baldness gave him an air of fragility. He looked like a cancer patient or an old man—someone not long for the world. But he was alive and safe, which made him one of the most beautiful things Erik had ever laid eyes on. Against all logic their harebrained scheme had worked, and they’d been right to do it. If Charles was on a downhill slide, and a fast one by the look of it, they might just have gotten to him in time.

So what the fuck happened now?

Erik paced for a few minutes, back and forth in a path perpendicular to the bed so he never had to turn his back to its occupant, before the futility of that struck him and he half sat, half fell back on to the lab stool next to the heart monitor.

“Wake up,” he said experimentally.

Charles didn’t listen. Then again, when had he ever?

“Your students miss you,” he tried next.

That didn’t hit the right note either. He needed something saccharine and nostalgic but with enough urgency that Charles would _want_ to wake up. Feeling idiotic (and hoping Hank hadn’t installed video cameras in the lab without telling anyone), he leaned in closer. “You’re late for class, professor. Your history syllabus isn’t finished. Scott’s tearing up the back lawn again. Hank wants you to take a look at the schematics for the jet.”

Then, impulsively, “There’s a new chess board upstairs. I could use your help breaking it in.”

Still no response. Of course he hadn’t expected Charles to wake up completely coherent and miraculously recovered at the sound of his voice, but Erik nevertheless felt a stab of disappointment that there hadn’t been _something_ —a flicker under the eyelids, a twitch in the fingers, the slightest movement of his head against the pillow, anything that might mean Charles was still in there somewhere.

He sighed, leaned back. With no heat he muttered, “Stubborn bastard.”

The initial post-rescue panic had ebbed away after hours of uneventful observation and positive test results and his exhaustion was beginning to cast a melancholy veil over everything. Now the mansion anecdotes and observations he’d saved up over their months of separation flowed to the front of his mind. They gathered on the tip of his tongue and he closed his mouth on them. The audience was wrong. Less wrong than it had been, of course, in that any version of Charles was an improvement on his total absence, but talking to Charles now felt like talking to himself. He’d done enough of that after Washington before he met Magda, when he was trying to get his head on straight again. These days it made him feel vaguely unsettled, teetering on an old precipice. He wanted conversation, laughter, the thoughtful frown that meant Charles was giving something his total attention, the scoffs and smirks and sighs sprinkled so liberally throughout his conversational style.

Something he’d told Raven once came back to him, a stronger thought than any of the others. Strong enough that it forced its way past his lips and into the open air:

“None of it works without you.”

Inevitably, involuntarily, Erik slept. Hunched over the mattress with his head pillowed on his arms at first; then, when he woke up with agonizing cramps in his neck and back, on the bed Hank had pointed out. He expected to wake for the second time when Hank and Moira came back into the lab in the morning.

He didn’t expect it to be to a familiar British accent—slurred with sleep and gravel-rough—saying his name hesitantly, almost querulously, the way children called for their parents after nightmares.

“Erik?”

“Charles?” He made it across the room at a speed that would have impressed even Peter. Still, it wasn’t quite as fast as the speed with which his stomach flipped when Charles looked up at him, _through_ him, and called his name again. Like he wasn’t even there. Erik felt nausea settle just below his diaphragm, begin a slow creep up his throat. Charles’s eyes were open, they tracked normally as he stared wildly around the room, he had the understandable confusion of someone whose reality had abruptly, inexplicably turned upside down (which required a connection with reality in the first place), and all of it would have been good news if he hadn’t also been shouting for a man less than a foot away.

Running solely on instinct, Erik put his hands on either side of Charles’s face, trying to calm him down, or at least keep him from thrashing until he hurt himself.

It worked a little too well. Charles went still—more than that, he froze completely.

Then he burst into tears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i caught up on comments, finally!! so like, feel free to leave more? :)


	16. The Defense Rests

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this was gonna be all comfort, no hurt, and then i was like bahahaha...no. so boring. have both.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kee i did the thing!

Charles jerked awake as a hand came to rest gently on his shoulder. The burst of panic was instinctual and he choked a little on the inhale of his next breath, but had calmed by the exhale. Used to be he could identify someone from the touch of their mind; now he was learning to identify them by literal touch. It was a slow process but he knew the press of these fingers, the calluses on this palm. He turned his head.

“You always did come and go as you pleased, but this feels excessive,” he mumbled as the vague Erikesque shape to his left solidified just enough to for his brain to register it as the man himself.

Not that the recognition would hold for long. It relied almost entirely on physical contact; all Erik had to do was lift his hand and move—just a few steps would do it—and Charles’s mind would lose him. It was a peculiar kind of forgetting. He’d never understood what a crucial role his telepathy played in solidifying his sense of reality until it was gone. There was no comparison; lose sight, smell, or touch and the other senses compensated, but there was nothing in the world that could compensate for this.

There was just…loss.

“What’s different about me compared to yesterday?” Erik asked.

“Can I have my breakfast before your silly tests?” Charles said petulantly. He could see it hovering on a metal tray over Erik’s shoulder—Earl Gray with lemon, orange juice, toast and eggs, same as always. His appetite had returned a few days ago and with a vengeance; he’d gain back the weight lost during his imprisonment in record time, Hank had said (and a few extra pounds besides, Moira had teased). 

“No. Breakfast is your reward for the correct answer.”

“You should be nicer to me. I’ve been through an ordeal,” Charles complained.

He was being facetious, really. Before Cairo he would have laughed in the face of anyone who’d described his current circumstances, and his dubious grasp on reality only made it seem more improbable, but he’d learned to at least act like it was all really happening. As unlikely as it seemed, Erik brought him breakfast on a daily basis, read aloud to him for hours with one hand casually touching his arm, soothed nightmares and took him outside every afternoon and hovered like a mother hen in a way Charles would have mocked him for if he hadn’t been so pathetically grateful for it. In fact he doubted whether it was even possible for Erik to be nicer than he already was.

So he tried to answer the question—not to earn breakfast, but because Erik had asked him to. Frowning, pushing the limits of his crippled perception, he scanned from ginger head to bare feet. As usual, yesterday’s memories were clouded over with a fog so close to translucence that its impenetrability was frustrating, not frightening. He  _knew_  he knew this. But every time he thought he’d grasped the crucial details they slipped away again, the way it was with all life’s minutiae—the arrangement of books on the bottom left bookshelf, the order of tins in the pantry, the things he’d looked at a thousand times but never really seen.

Hank called it retrograde amnesia. The kids would have called it “a total drag.” Charles tried not to think about it, mostly, but Erik did insist.

At last he did the only thing he could: fell back on intuition. The subconscious habit of desperately cataloguing everything about Erik in case he never saw him again was still perfectly functional, even if the rest of his mind was on the fritz. What about Erik was different from yesterday? When he stopped thinking so hard, something did _feel_ different…

“Your face…you shaved. You had a beard yesterday,” he said. He tried not to let it sound like a question.

“It was hardly a beard,” Erik said, like men with beards were terribly deficient in some way. “Moira said I needed one for that interview. She gave me a picture of Clint Eastwood to use as inspiration.”

But apparently the answer was right enough, because he floated the tray into Charles’s lap. There was a second mug beside the tea, containing Erik’s preferred black coffee. He sipped from it while Charles ate, their linked hands still a comforting anchor to reality, and there was quiet for a few minutes. In this way Erik was the same as he had been. Not one for small talk, a man of action and few words. He let his presence speak for him, as his absence had spoken for him after Cuba and Washington, and in the decade after.  

“How’s your head?” he asked finally.

He wasn’t talking about Charles’s mind. He meant the marks on his temples where the suppression device had been drilled in, the deep holes and the sores around them.

“Aches,” Charles said. He let Erik float away the empty tray, leaned back against the pillows. “Itchy, too. If Hank would just let me get in one good scratch…”

It was mostly a joke, but not completely.

“He won’t. Don’t touch them. I’ll get you some aspirin.”

Without meaning to Charles grasped his hand even tighter; Erik offered him a gentle smile and squeezed back. “I’ll only be a second.”

His tone said  _relax_ , an order Charles deliberately disobeyed. Instead, even as his mind lost its grasp on the knowledge that the shape going to the door was Erik, he forced his eyes to follow its movement. Then he waited, repeating the details to himself enough times to make his headache worse. Ginger hair, all black clothing, slender, about six feet. And when a moving shape that matched that description entered the room again he said “Erik,” even though the shape felt like nothing—the kind of nothing you forgot immediately, not the searing void of deliberate telepathic suppression.

Erik stopped, surprised. “Can you sense me?”

“No,” Charles admitted. “Basic pattern recognition.”

Erik hummed in acknowledgment and handed over the aspirin and water, then took a seat with his hand on Charles’s arm again. At once Charles felt more lucid, and the world brighter and heavier, more tangible. But even with the physical contact Erik’s expression was inscrutable, and not just because so much of Charles’s ability to read people’s faces had been tied in to his ability to simultaneously read the tenor of their thoughts.

“You do seem sharper today, though. More present.” There was an appraising note in Erik’s voice.

Charles laughed, a bitter coughing sound. “Do I.”

“Markedly,” Erik said. Not with pity or false hope, but like it was a fact so obvious that stating it was hardly worth the effort.

But perhaps he was right. Something felt different, some small shift in Charles’s perception. Even if he couldn’t remember most of it, he knew he’d spent a long time now letting things happen to him. He slept, he woke, he ate the food Erik brought, he didn’t object to Hank’s tests or the afternoon excursions on the grounds. Hank had used the word  _catatonic_ at first but for Charles it was much simpler: never resist. That he  _did_  remember, a lesson so well-learned that it was now rooted in muscle memory. Resistance meant pain or even more loss. Telepathy first. Later food, water, social interaction, sensory input, the little range of movement he had left…they’d been endlessly creative, his captors. And when so many things were taken away, the things he’d been willing to do to get them back…

This was the first time since his imprisonment began that he wanted to do something of his own volition and not because he’d been told to. He just didn’t have the self-awareness to put it in those terms or understand what it meant. He could only fumble on, guided by instinct alone, groping toward something he didn’t understand.

“Erik, I need your help.”

“Anything.”

“I’ll need a pen and paper first.”

“Why?”

Charles sighed. The aspirin hadn’t done a damn thing for his headache, which was now joined by an uneasy roiling sensation high in his stomach, more like seasickness than anxiety. He hung onto Erik’s hand like he might go pitching off the bed or spiraling into space without it to ground him. And took the plunge. “Because I’m going to ask rather a lot of questions, and I can’t trust myself to remember the answers. I think I’d better write them down.”

Part of him hoped Erik would say it was too soon, questions could wait and right now all he had to do was focus on recovering, they’d come to the rest later. But that wasn’t Erik, even at his nicest. 

Instead he smiled. “See? I told you it was a good day.”

Charles couldn’t have disagreed more as he stared down at the notebook page an hour later. It was filled top to bottom with his cramped scrawl.

_Raven took your place._

_Trial ongoing. no discovery. last to be cross-examined (2 weeks)_

_School open, X-Men in training, limited classes offered, comparable to summer vacation schedule._

_Erik Lehnsherr (not Magneto) acting spokesperson for school_

_Psylocke at mansion indefinitely. tentative truce. critical in rescue._

_Held 3+ months, free eight days. telepathic suppression continues in absence of device._

_Neurological damage?_

_Long-term sensory deprivation, esp. re: telepathic and physical contact._

There was more, but it didn’t matter. Not when  _Raven took your place_ occupied the top line, unavoidably and placidly insistent on remaining there. Remaining true.

“How could you do it? What gave you the  _right_?” His voice shook. His hands too. His fingers were still entwined with Erik’s and he wanted to shove him away violently, but he couldn’t yell at a man he couldn’t find. A horrible thought struck him. “Did you keep this from me on purpose, or have we had this conversation before? Did I forget it?”

He didn’t know which would be worse.

Erik shifted warily; clearly he hadn’t expected the conversation to take this turn, or Charles to become so agitated so quickly. “I can only answer one question at a time.”

“Fine. Answer this one first. What the bloody  _fuck_ were you thinking?”

“ _We_ were thinking that at your rate of deterioration you might not make it through the trial at all. You were losing your grip.”

“Your confidence in me means the world,” Charles spat. “You trusted me so little that you decided to put my sister in danger instead? Not that it’s such a shock—you always did trust Raven more than me—”

Vindictively, he hoped that he hadn’t imagined the flash of hurt in Erik’s eyes. If he focused on that, on stoking his anger at any cost, perhaps it would overcome him before the panic he could feel building in his core imploded, rendering him the same useless, shivering thing he had been all those months in prison. Anger seemed to work for Erik. And Charles was so tired of being afraid.

Erik dared to look confused. “You can’t honestly expect me to apologize for rescuing you. We agreed to cooperate with them in return for fair treatment and safety for you. They broke their word, we broke ours.”

“They don’t know that! Do you know what they could be doing to Raven, thinking she’s me?”

“Raven is strong, she knows what she’s capable of withstanding—”

“But I’m not, is that it?”

“You know that’s not what I’m saying.”

Ah, there it was. Erik’s body language when he lost his temper was still the same—the way his jaw clenched but the rest of his body relaxed, muscles loose like he wasn’t planning a dozen ways to incapacitate the subject of his irritation. Or at least Charles assumed his thoughts still followed that old pattern; it wasn’t like he could check. He felt that same cruel surge of satisfaction.

Then Erik sighed, seemed to deflate. There was something mournful in the way he ran his hand through his hair, shaking his head. “Your anger is a price I’ve paid before for doing what I thought was best for all of us. I knew I’d have to pay it again this time. But know this—I’ve never done it with fewer regrets.”

“You threw Raven to the wolves and you’ve never had fewer regrets?”

“You’re twisting my words, Charles. What do want from me?” 

“Get her back!”

“How? How do you expect me to do that?”

“The same way you got me back, use Psylocke—”

“And have _no one_ in your cell? Let the humans realize you escaped? They’d come here first. They’d torch your school, kill or torture your students—or at least they’d try. Because I’d protect us. And you’d get the war you never wanted.”

“Are you sure that wasn’t your plan all along? Put me in an impossible position, force me to approve of the war you _always_ wanted?”

“If that had been my plan all along I wouldn’t have waited for them to torture you into complete irrationality.” Erik’s eyes had gone flinty. It was that old icy anger, the one guaranteed to get under Charles’s skin. “I wouldn’t have lived in your house for months, babysitting your children and playing nice with the press and keeping that stupid fucking promise I made you after Cairo. I could have rescued you, never endangered Raven, and struck first to protect us all _the next day._ And I didn’t.”

That was too much, too many complex ideas and might-have-beens, to process alongside the current din in Charles’s mind. Instead, riding a high of pure instinct and zero forethought, he went for the jugular.

“If you ever gave a damn about me, you’d find another way.”

Somehow the sudden silence felt louder than the shouts of the past few minutes. If Charles could have seen himself he would have seen his eyes locked on Erik’s with maniacal intensity, like his was the only face in the world and if he looked away he would lose all concept of reality. It was something close to true, perhaps, how far gone he was now. He might also have noticed that he had clenched the nails of his free hand into his palm hard enough to break the skin. There was a thin line of blood tracking its way down his wrist that he didn’t feel and Erik pretended not to see.

“If I ever gave a damn about you,” Erik echoed. He sounded lost.

Then he wrenched his hand loose and stood up, started to walk away, and Charles was alone. 

The sound that tore loose from him was more anguished wail than coherent protest, but he managed to hook his fingers in Erik’s sweater long enough to recover the power of speech. “Wait, wait—Erik—”

Erik tried to twist away but Charles pulled as hard as he could. Stitches snapped in the fabric, enough to throw Erik off-balance, and he sat back down on the mattress, hard.

“I’m sorry, please don’t go, please stay. I didn’t mean it, it wasn’t fair.” Charles knew he was babbling and breathless and must look pathetic, his face wet with sweat or tears or both, but the relief of getting his hands back on Erik trumped every other concern. And besides, what dignity did he have left to lose? He’d take humiliation over that awful sensation of being lost in himself and entirely alone, when the distance of only a few inches might as well be the other side of the planet. He kept an iron grip on one of Erik’s hands in case he tried break away again, and locked the other around the back of his neck, applying pressure until their foreheads knocked together. Now Erik’s proximity made him impossible to ignore—he was here, he was real, his skin was warm and his breathing was fast on Charles’s face with his own agitation. Charles felt the chaos in his mind begin to recede. Let Erik be the world. That he could bear. And if a world built around Erik Lehnsherr wasn’t necessarily the safest or most stable one—well, at least they’d be in danger together.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he repeated.

“Be careful,” Erik said. His voice was low. It didn’t sound like a command or a warning. Something closer to a plea.

Charles didn’t know what he was promising and didn’t care. “I will, I will.”

“You know I did. I do. Give a damn.”

“I know.”

It felt more than right—it felt _necessary—_ to be so close. These were precious words in a fragile moment that couldn’t survive outside the miniscule space between them; they needed to be shielded by tangled limbs and not spoken above a whisper.

Then, as if on cue, the immense loss washed over Charles again in a wave of melancholy—they were just words, no telepathic resonance in Erik’s beautiful mind, no chance they could weave their thoughts together too. Physical contact was enough to keep him sane but telepathy…telepathy gave life depth, complexity. Meaning, instead of this current liminal world of shadows and confusion.

He moved, or Erik did, or they moved together. He’d never be sure. But suddenly their foreheads were no longer touching and it was their mouths pressed together instead, so hard it almost hurt. Erik’s lips were dry, colder than they should have been, and Charles had to open his mouth for air because his nose was too stuffed to breathe through—apparently he had been crying after all—and it was messy and clumsy, a little too desperate to be romantic or even comforting.

It didn’t matter. It was _Erik._

Who suddenly stiffened, then shoved him back by the shoulders and held him at a distance. His mouth was twisted like he was about to be sick and there was a visible tremor in his arms.

“I can’t—I’m not—”

Charles held perfectly still, like he was trying not to spook a wild animal. Erik looked like he had a thousand thoughts vying for primacy in his head; Charles found he had none at all.

“I have to go. Get some rest,” Erik said, instead of finishing either of the sentences about what he couldn’t do. It was a fair approximation of his normal tone of voice, as if nothing had happened, and was only undercut by the uncharacteristic lack of grace in his movements as he stumbled to his feet. Charles didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved to be spared a conversation he was in no way prepared for. 

“I’ll see you later?” he said carefully.

The nod in response was short but definite.

After Erik vanished out the door and out of awareness, but before any of the last few minutes slipped away from his untrustworthy memory, Charles wrote one more line in the notebook—this time in the bottom margin of the very last page, for him and him alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i wanted to get this up before the 2-months-since-last-update marker was over, which is in two hours and 19 minutes, but now responding to comments asap! so feel free to leave more :)


	17. Surprise Witness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jean ships it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fallout from the last chapter

“You’re a lot of things, Magneto, but you’re not a coward,” Raven had told him once. Early days after Cuba, Erik thought, but a lot of that time was a blur so he couldn’t quite be sure. Lots of indistinguishable safe-houses previously inhabited by reprehensible dead men; lots of raids on identical labs to free mutants who all wore the same awful blank expressions; lots of public destruction after private intimidation failed and watching speeches made by famous faces whose eyes turned yellow as soon as the cameras turned off.

He couldn’t remember what he’d said in response. Maybe something stoic like “When there’s nothing left to lose, there’s nothing to be afraid of,” but likely nothing. He’d gone from laconic to monosyllabic those first few months.

But coming from her it meant something. Raven never lied about things that mattered to her and had a hatred of cowardice that came from a lifetime of giving into it.

The more honest response, though, and the one he would never have given her, would have been: “Only when it comes to your brother.”

True then, true now. He spent the rest of the day with the shameful wish to beg off his nightly visit, claiming exhaustion or business, punctuated by the even more shameful hope that Charles might forget about the kiss entirely. It wasn’t out of the question, either—without his telepathy he had trouble forming new memories. He’d tried to articulate it abstractly, since no technicalities existed for things like this, as in: “You know when you’re waking up in the morning and you can _feel_ a vivid, beautiful dream slipping away and five seconds later you don’t remember a bit of it? But you know you’ve lost something? I’m in that five seconds, Erik, _all the time._ ”

Usually he didn’t get much past that before he broke off—or trailed off, depending on whether frustration or depression set in first—and pulled Erik closer, frowning and twitchy and somehow very far away. In a quiet moment, with tears in his eyes, he’d confessed that at least with the suppression device he’d had the hope that his telepathy was still there, and it would revert to its natural state as soon as the artificial impediment was removed. Now it wasn’t being kept from him. It was just…gone.

It made Erik a monster to hope that Charles would forget this too, he knew that. And he hated himself for it almost as much as he hated himself for the kiss itself. But if Charles forgot, then Erik could pretend it had never happened, and then he might stop seeing Magda’s face, gentle yet judgmental, every time he closed his eyes.

He wanted, desperately and selfishly, to talk to Raven. As much as they both hated to admit it, she knew him better than anyone but Charles. She’d know what to say to make him stop feeling like he wanted to crawl out of his own skin. But she wasn’t here, because he had—how had Charles put it? Something melodramatic but not _wrong—_ thrown her to the wolves, that was it.

By evening, he was so deep in self-recrimination as he turned a corner that he almost knocked Jean over. She managed to stay upright but her armful of papers and books went flying, and he barely had time to hook his powers into the staples and clip fasteners before they hit the ground. He floated them back into her arms, apologetic.

“I’m sorry, Jean, I’m wasn’t paying attention—”

“I know,” she interrupted. “That’s why I’m here. I can feel you all the way across the house.”

Sometimes it made his head swim, how difficult it was to reconcile this Jean, sixteen and shy and sweet, with the force of nature from Cairo. “You were coming to…check on me?”

Jean shrugged with one shoulder. “Yes? But also all that guilt is making my head hurt, so it’s not like, all about you.” Her small smile made it clear that she was joking, and Erik forced one in return. It occurred to him suddenly that if this conversation had taken place the first time he lived in the mansion, twenty years ago, he would have brushed Jean aside and stormed off by now, ego bruised and bristling with annoyance that he’d allowed even a momentary distraction from his all-consuming objective. That seemed needlessly cruel now.

“Always a helpful reminder,” he said instead.

There was an awkward pause, which let him know that it would take more than a promise to keep it down, thought-wise, to get him off the hook here. Unfortunately, Jean found the words to continue the conversation before he found the ones to get out of it.

“Look, I’m not snooping, but I don’t have to be a telepath to know something happened. You’ve been acting strange since breakfast.” Without giving him a chance to defend himself she raced on, nervous but determined. “I’m going to tell you something. I haven’t told anyone else so don’t freak out or anything, okay? I had to go really deep in the professor’s mind in Cairo to throw Apocalypse out and I…saw some of his memories. Strong emotional experiences leave psionic imprints behind, did he ever tell you that? And a lot of them were about…you.”

“We always knew how to provoke each other,” Erik said ruefully, thinking of that morning.

“Not those kind of memories.”

Her tone of voice tipped him off—the hesitation, the awkwardness.

“Ah,” he said.

Oddly his first instinct—to back her against the wall and threaten to superheat the iron in her blood if she breathed a word of this to anyone else—barely registered before the unexpected urge to laugh overcame it. Poor Jean—she’d only been trying to save the world. And Charles, who sheltered his students from everything and looked like a saint while doing it, would be so mortified.

“Well. That’s…”

“Yeah,” Jean said. “But I swear I didn’t mean to—”

“Jean, I understand that there were extenuating circumstances. I’m not angry.”

And surprisingly he wasn’t. He trusted Jean as far as he trusted anyone these days and none of the secrets he would have killed to keep before Magda and Nina seemed worth hiding now. Let her know. He hoped she hadn’t _seen_ anything too intimate—those memories were for him and Charles alone, private and precious—but the knowing hardly bothered him at all. Besides, he hadn’t exactly been subtle about his priorities since Cairo. Three months of setting aside his desire to protect mutantkind at large, abandoning the rhetoric of violence for good press coverage _,_ feigning trust in a justice system he knew had nothing to do with justice at all, and all of it so he could be Charles’s most vocal defender instead. Jean might be the only one who _knew,_ but the others had probably guessed.

Looking at her expression, so open and sympathetic, it came to him suddenly that maybe he could use this to his advantage. There would come a time—there always did—when Hank or Moira or maybe even Charles himself decided that Erik was unstable and untrustworthy, a danger to the students and the school. They’d invite him to move on if they were being kind about it, or tell him to get out if they weren’t. He’d gone of his own free will before, even before they could ask, but this time…

This time the thought was unbearable. He’d put too much of himself into this place and these people; there simply wouldn’t be enough to survive on without them. Left alone with his memories and mistakes, he’d be lucky if he went mad. Even now he felt seismic tremors in dangerous places sometimes, shifting pieces where there should be stability, and suspected that without the work and people as constant distractions he wouldn’t make it. So no, he wasn’t going anywhere. They’d have to send Jean into his mind and convince him leaving with his idea if they wanted him gone so badly.

Which she wouldn’t agree to, if she believed something he didn’t—that he would never hurt any of them, especially not Charles. He knew better; she didn’t have to.

“I need you to understand that what you saw between me and Charles was a long time ago,” he said carefully. He had to play this with caution. A little vulnerability now was a small price for victory in the long term. “We were very young and things were…simpler. It’s different now.”

“Not so different, unless I’m wrong about what happened this morning.”

“What happened this morning shouldn’t have happened. Charles isn’t himself and I’m…not ready.”

He couldn’t say their names, but he didn’t need to. Though it didn’t seem possible, Jean’s expression softened even further and for an alarming moment he thought she was going to hug him. Thankfully she reined in the impulse. “I know. It’s too soon.”

“And twenty years too late.”

“Maybe for you. Not for him. I was _in his head,_ I know how he feels.”

It was easy to hide the small flicker of relief under the much larger, and entirely unfeigned, burst of renewed guilt. Getting Jean on his side might not be so hard after all. And…Charles had never actually said it back that morning, that he still cared too. Erik hadn’t realized until now that he needed to hear it; no matter how devastating his own feelings, betrayal that they were, they would have been even more devastating if he’d been alone in them.

“He’s a fool.”

“He’s not the only one,” she shot back. “You’re allowed to be happy again one day, Erik.”

Erik waited a moment, to make sure his voice was steady. “It’s also too soon for this conversation. When Charles is well, when Raven’s safe…then we can talk about happiness.”

Jean gave him a look he’d only seen on Nina’s face once or twice—she’d still been a little young for it—that communicated better than words that he was an idiot _and_ a bad liar, but she’d let him get away with it this one time.

“I’ll remember you said that,” she said ominously. “It’s not what I came to say anyway.”

“This cross-examination had a point?”

“Just…whatever happened, please be kind to him. He cares for you so much. He’s forgiven you so much. Don’t throw it back in his face, that’s all.”

_It’s all I know how to do,_ Erik thought, but he found himself nodding—in agreement? Bafflement? What _was_ it with the wisdom of teenage girls around here?—until Jean seemed satisfied and left him alone.

The rest of his response came in another form: a few hours later he collected the chess set from the library and a beer from the fridge and went to Charles’s room. For all the tension of that morning it was surprisingly easy, taking his usual seat and Charles’s hand at the same time, watching those foggy blue eyes brighten and focus on his face as his shoulders slumped with more relief than usual. Erik didn’t have to ask—obviously Charles remembered, and just as obviously he was trying to pretend that he didn’t. It was sad and sweet, and Erik squeezed his hand comfortingly without thinking about it.

“Hello.” Desperate to appear nonchalant, Charles zeroed in on the beer and raised an eyebrow. “None for me?”

“No alcohol, doctor’s orders. You can watch me drink, that’s all.”

“Go on then,” Charles said cheekily, and Erik tilted the bottle back, only realizing how it exposed the line of his throat when it was too late. The sip turned into more of a gulp, and when he put the bottle down Charles was looking away and the tips of his ears were pink. With his smooth scalp he’d never be able to hide a blush again. Something to tease him about, when things were a little less fraught between them.

“Feeling up to a game?” he said.

“I think so.”

Charles watched him set up the board hands-free, tracking each piece carefully. They’d only played a few times since his rescue; the pieces and how they moved were ingrained in his muscle memory but he had no grasp of strategy, he played like a beginner with minor intuitive flashes of his old brilliance. And it exhausted him quickly, that kind of effort. But it made him feel normal, and he wanted so badly to feel normal again.

Usually Erik did everything he could to encourage that—though he drew the line at letting Charles win—but tonight he looked up mid-game and let the words come before he could overthink them.

“Magda and I talked about bringing Nina here when she was a little older. I would have liked you to meet them.”

Charles blinked, answered carefully. “I would have liked that too.”

“I’d like to tell you about them, every now and then. Just little things. It would help, I think, if there was someone else who remembered them too.”

“I’d be honored,” Charles said. He had a way of saying the silliest clichés with such perfect sincerity that Erik couldn’t even mock him for it.

“Not just now, I don’t think. But soon.”

Charles nodded and, for once, didn’t rush to fill the silence with words that would crush the fragility of the moment. It was more perceptive than he’d been yet without his telepathy to guide him in the nuances of communication, and Erik wondered if he was improving or simply too taken aback to react at all. It was a fleeting thought, and diagnostics were unimportant now; it felt far more pressing to float the chess board aside and sit on the bed next to Charles, wrapping an arm around a shoulder that still felt too bony. He tugged gently and Charles readjusted his legs so he could rest his head on Erik’s chest. He’d said that feeling someone’s heartbeat was the closest thing he had now to feeling their thoughts. At least Erik could give him that.

“This morning wasn’t a mistake. But my marriage and my child—it would feel too much like replacing them, now,” he said eventually. The guilt lurked, but far enough away that he could live with it.

“I’d never want to replace them. I’d never let that happen.” Charles raised his head. His eyes shimmered just a little; Erik would have missed it if he hadn’t been only inches away. “I’m so sorry about this morning. I wrote down what happened so I could be sure I apologized. I should never have said—”

“We _will_ get her back. I promise.”

He cherished those moments of serenity in the days after. Charles was never so coherent again. It was as if he’d been holding himself together by sheer force of will while his mind processed that he’d been rescued, and when he finally believed it he had to believe the rest of it as well—Raven was gone. And so was his telepathy, with no sign it was coming back.

He panicked then, in a way Erik hadn’t imagined him capable of. All the memories he’d repressed about the torture and experiments he’d undergone flooded back—everything but that one, crucial thing. He screamed himself hoarse, awake and asleep; he had nightmares so horrible it took him hours to recover. His depression was replaced by rage so intense and blind that Erik once, guiltily, thought it was safer for all of them that he didn’t have his powers.

Nothing snapped him out of it. Charles pushed them away, emotionally and physically; there was no recognition in his eyes and he didn’t seem to know or care who was in the room with him anymore. He hurtled trays of food and cups of tea, insisted he could take care of himself but kept the bare minimum of hygiene necessary to stave off infections. It was hardly surprising when he began to lose weight again, to look more and more like the man Psylocke had dragged through a vortex. He flat-out refused to go outside or leave his room at all except to visit the lab, which he’d become obsessed with. He bullied Hank incessantly. There must be something they could do, he shouted. The risks didn’t matter; he was hardly a stranger to experimentation, was he? Electroshock, adrenaline injections, use Jean, reverse-engineer the serum—Hank was the fucking genius, why couldn’t he figure it out?

Hank was baffled, then alarmed. The students were scared. And Erik was rapidly losing patience.

“Was it like this after…?” he asked Hank one night. _Cuba, Vietnam, I abandoned him._

“Better and worse,” Hank said tightly. “At least he’s feeling _something._ And he’s not drunk or high as a kite so that’s…nice.”

A crash echoed from upstairs, followed by a frustrated scream.

Moira stormed into the room a few minutes later. Whatever progress she’d made toward forgiving Charles for erasing a critical part of her life had been arrested by his current “difficult adjustment period,” as Hank was putting it. Without personal loyalty and memories of him at his best, she was Charles’s least sympathetic audience (except for Psylocke, who had started hinting that things around the mansion were getting boring).

She swiped Hank’s scotch and took a long sip, scowling. “You’re not going to be able to hide him forever if he’s like this. As long as those reporters are outside it has to look normal around here. I don’t like wildcards.”

“You went through something like this after Dallas, didn’t you? Does it get easier?”

It took Erik a moment to realize that Hank was talking to him, mostly because there was hope in his voice and not the usual barely-suppressed resentment. He’d been trying not to think of it, his own similar experience; it made those cracks deep in his mental foundations shift ominously. But painful as it was, he closed his eyes and forced himself back to that white room under the Pentagon where he’d spent so many years alone, robbed of his mutation, grasping desperately for the one thing that had never abandoned him. Why had the possibility that Charles felt the same way about his telepathy never occurred to Erik? He must; he was mourning its loss like the death of a loved one, willing to undergo any experimental procedure to get it back.

“Easier isn’t the word I would use. I acclimated, eventually. I don’t know how long it took.”

Months, it had felt like. They couldn’t endure months of this.

“From what I understand there’s a significant difference between physiological and psionic mutations. He may have a much harder time,” Moira ventured.

Hank nodded. “My research indicates—”

They all jumped at the sudden noise: the hollow echo of someone pounding on the front door. Someone strong.

“Get upstairs. Keep Charles quiet, I’ll handle this,” Erik snapped, recovering first. He was the public face of the school, after all, the one to handle visitors—though they had none scheduled for 8 p.m. on a Sunday—and presumably errant rookie reporters who came bumbling out of the press pool and up to the house against the advice of those who’d made that mistake before. He gave Hank and Moira one minute to follow orders and then yanked the front door open with his powers, pasting on an icy smile guaranteed to make anyone with half a brain turn tail and run.  

The man on the doorstep didn’t seem impressed.

Then again, considering the last time Erik had seen him he’d been run through with rebar and soaring over a ruined stadium, it made sense that his threshold for impressed was higher than most.

“I’m here about the professor’s sister,” he mumbled around an unlit cigar. “Might want to invite me in before those reporters get suspicious.”

Too shocked to scrape his jaw off the floor, much less think of a better idea, Erik invited him in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my love of logan totally skyrocketed after the movie, so of course i had to include him, but i am ride-or-die cherik trash so he will have zero romantic involvement with either of them, jsyk
> 
> sorry i still have to respond to some reviews! plz leave more anyway :)


	18. Deliberation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Psylocke has one (1) Feeling and doesn't like it. She also has a plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i can't believe i sidelined charles having a delicious mental breakdown for plot things. AM I EVEN ME RN.
> 
> tw: some ableist language re charles's current neuroatypical state i guess? psylocke's a mutant supremacist and a snob so.

She’d moved into a house of fucking children, and the kids weren’t even the worst of it.

Not that she was crazy about the kids either—she’d never had a shred of maternal instincts—but they were a damn delight compared to the boundless dysfunction of everyone else. Even before Xavier lost his mind his mood swings had affected the whole mansion: his good days saw what could only be described as family dinners with laughter and playful shoving, while bad days meant tense silence and Lehnsherr brooding in odd corners while the furry one and his human girlfriend tried to keep everyone’s spirits up. Xavier might as well have been projecting his mood with the powers he no longer had.

(Psylocke had been less surprised than most when it all went south. During his rescue, in the few rushed seconds before they’d ripped off the suppressor and he started seizing, something in his eyes had made her shiver—something very young and very lost, without a shred of recognition. Charles Xavier, if he was in there, was buried deep, safe while this creature of instinct guarded the gate. In retrospect it was obvious that a mind stretched that thin would snap eventually. If anything it should have happened sooner but between his disorientation and the entire mansion acting like The Charles Xavier Rehabilitation Center he made it a whole week before reality sank in.)

Unfortunately the only thing she found more boring than humans were people incapable of rational thought, and currently Xavier was both. And of course she understood why the others were upset and she wasn’t stupid enough to roll her eyes where Lehnsherr could see it, but the real tragedy in her opinion was that the most powerful telepath on the planet was no more than baseline now. She would have literally killed for a mutation that strong and instead of using it to protect himself Xavier had let the Americans treat it like a crime and not proof he was better than all of them. Mutants who thought their powers were _gifts_ and not birthrights didn’t deserve them but it was still a fucking shame—all that power, in the hands of a guy with a brain like scrambled eggs.

Then, just when the Cypriots were starting to look like fun again, Logan Howlett showed up.

“Wolverine,” she said when she followed the hushed whispers downstairs to find him exchanging suspicious looks with Lehnsherr.

“Been awhile, Betsy.”

“ _Betsy_?” Lehnsherr repeated, before the rest of it sunk in. “You two know each other.”

Not well enough for a hug or handshake—besides, neither of them were the type—but Psylocke found herself smiling a little, seeing him again. “We crossed paths a couple of times on the mutant underground. Moscow and Berlin, and then a few years later in London. You’d parted ways with Mystique by then so it must have been, what…’75?”

Lehnsherr looked like he’d bitten down on a lemon. “Oh?”

“Mystique never mentioned she was the one who fished me out of the Potomac after you dumped me there?” Howlett did an abysmal job of hiding his glee. “Wonder why not. I was at loose ends so I stuck with her for a while after that, got my head on straight.”

“And what happened to that…partnership?”

“Oh, you know how it is with philosophical differences. She was willing to do anything for the cause, I’m more of a live and let live kind of guy. Not much for it.”

That was more than Psylocke had known before. When Mystique had rolled up with a surly, hairy Canadian in tow just after the fiasco in Washington no one had been brave enough to ask questions, even though they were usually paranoid about outsiders. The grapevine said he’d had something to do with Magneto’s breakout and some blurry security footage placed a guy who looked a lot like him in Paris when everything went to shit at the Accords. But since by all accounts everyone else had been in Paris to _stop_ Mystique how the two of them had ended up on the same side after the fact was as much a mystery as anything else.

Psylocke had met them for the first time a few months later, in Moscow. She’d put word out that she was looking to offload some hard drives “liberated” from a Soviet scientist; not an hour later she’d been completing the transaction with the last two buyers she would have expected. And sure, she had caught glimpses of them a handful of times before that (Mystique’s rock star status insulated her a bit and she seemed to like it that way and the Wolverine, who never left her side, had a glare that scared off even the most intrepid hero-worshippers) but vodka shots to seal the deal were a far cry from glimpses across a dark room. _Fine_ , she might have been a little star struck.

She’d done business with the two of them again, but it hadn’t been much of a shock to find Howlett alone in a London dive bar a few years after that. He was like her: looking to make a living, and the quicker the buck the better. Mercenaries like them didn’t last long with ideologues like Mystique—causes and paychecks had a tendency to be mutually exclusive.

Meanwhile Lehnsherr seemed more bemused than anything else and she wondered how strange it was for him, seeing two distinct phases of his life in the same place and knowing they were connected in ways that had nothing to do with him. He’d missed more than he knew, out of contact with mutantkind all those years.

“And you’re back now because…”

“Were you not listening? She saved my life. Means I owe her.”

“As admirable as that sentiment is, you can’t see her right now.”

Howlett smirked. “You don’t think that’s up to her to decide?”

Muscles jumped in Lehnsherr’s jaw as he clenched his teeth, clearly ready to fight before he told the truth, but he didn’t know Howlett’s tells like Psylocke did. She’d seen that smirk before…when he was fucking with people.

“You bastard,” she said. “How’d you find out?”

Howlett grinned around his unlit cigar. “I know how Mystique acts when she’s playing incapacitated, and I know how Charles acts without his powers. A couple weeks ago when I started seeing a whole lot more signs of the first and a whole lot less of the second. I figured someone here might be able to clear up that little mystery for me.”

Lehnsherr had gone dangerously still. “Who else have you told?”

“I strike you as the chatty type, do I?”

Between Lehnsherr’s panic that their safety was about to slip away and Howlett’s wounded pride at the implication that he’d sell them out, the tension in the foyer had ratcheted high enough that Psylocke’s head ached. She needed backup—and to separate the two of them before someone did something stupid.

“Look, Erik, why don’t you bring Hank and Moira down so we only have to do this once. Kitchen in five?”

Miracle of fucking miracles, he agreed with only a token amount of muttered threats and she was able to get a beer down Howlett fast in her equivalent of whatever calm-the-fuck-down efforts McCoy and MacTaggart were presumably involved in upstairs. Even better, no screams followed the three of them back down—McCoy must have knocked Xavier out so they’d only have to deal with one crisis at a time—and Lehnsherr looked less likely to throw their guest through a window by his belt buckle. The furball knew how to get a job done, she’d give him that. (Truth was she didn’t mind Hank and she probably would have liked his girlfriend too, if not for the whole “human” thing.)

“Logan, it’s good to see you again,” McCoy said, sincere but cautious. “We always hoped you’d find your way back.”

“Beast,” Howlett nodded in greeting, which was practically effusive coming from him. There was juicy gossip there, Psylocke guessed. She’d always assumed that Xavier had hired Howlett for Magneto’s breakout and the Mystique mission (which had technically been a success, if embarrassingly sloppy by her standards). But McCoy was looking at Howlett like a friend, not like a one-time hired gun. For guys who’d known each other for two days ten years ago that made no sense, unless there was more to the story.

“Erik says you know where Raven is,” MacTaggart said. She’d never been much for pleasantries.

“Chowing down on Sing Sing meatloaf about now, I’d bet.” The joke landed like a lead balloon and Howlett rolled his eyes. “Fuck’s sake, you can all stop looking so stricken. I’ve kept my trap shut. She’s got the humans fooled. And who besides the people in this room know ’em both well enough to spot the difference?”

“Taking Charles’s place was her idea,” McCoy said defensively. “No one pressured her into it. We didn’t want to put her in danger but she…kind of insisted on it.”

“Oh, that I’m sure of. Couldn’t make her do a thing she didn’t want to and couldn’t stop her if she did, that’s the Mystique I remember. Relax. I’m not gonna crawl up your ass about a stunt you pulled in an impossible situation, much less one that worked.”

He was right, there—it had worked, and not just in that Mystique hadn’t been caught. Not that she cared about their little scheme beyond her own well-paid involvement, but Psylocke snuck periodic peeks at the folders of press clippings in the ground-floor office. They littered tables and spilled into boxes on the floor; there’d be enough to pack a filing cabinet by the time this was over. The pile dedicated to neutral coverage had grown most since the switch, which was about the best they could expect. Xavier looked better, journalists wrote. More alert, more eloquent. Hints of the professor and leader he’d been once. What a shame such a good mutant had ended up here but it went to show you never really knew what they were capable of, did you. Especially those psionics…

God, she fucking hated humans.

Point was, it wasn’t a turn-around so extreme it raised suspicions but it was harder now to dismiss Xavier as a drugged up traitor too disoriented to make his own case, and that was all Mystique.

Lehnsherr leaned forward to catch Howlett’s attention. “You said you owe her. How do you intend to repay that debt?”

“He means, should we brace for impact?” Hank translated.

“We can’t let you pull her out,” Moira said. “The situation’s too precarious already, and while I’m sure your intentions are good—”

“I’m not,” Lehnsherr said flatly.

“—we can’t afford to rock the boat right now. This was all for nothing if ‘Charles’ doesn’t make it through the whole trial.”

Psylocke surprised herself by speaking up. “And after that?”

“I’m sorry?”

“After the trial,” she elaborated. “The verdict is fixed, we all know that. They have to make an example of him. Mystique took his place to save Xavier’s life, not win his case. So what happens to her after he’s pronounced guilty?”

 _Guilty_ was also an accurate description of the looks they exchanged. Of course they hadn’t _forgotten_ Mystique. She’d somehow pulled the house and all its strange occupants together around her in a way no one had fully realized until she was gone. It wasn’t just training the X-Men. She’d counseled the kids without condescension, coordinated with Lehnsherr on their public message and McCoy on the rebuilding of the mansion’s defenses (and new offenses), even made sure the little ones had something like a normal class schedule. Now they were like debris drifting off into space without the gravitational pull of the star that had held them in its orbit (fuck, Psylocke thought—she’d been watching too much PBS).

It was just that Mystique was as safe as she could be for someone undercover and out of their reach, and Xavier needed them so much. At his best he’d required careful supervision for the physical and emotional trauma; now they were in constant crisis mode, white-knuckling it day by day. Long-term strategizing fell by the wayside when a distraught (former?) telepath was doing his best to scream the house down and the children were crying downstairs. One night Psylocke had even overheard McCoy telling MacTaggart that at least the trial bought them some time to figure out a treatment plan for Charles before they had to coordinate a rescue op for Mystique too.

Howlett whistled, reading the answer in their silence. “Up shit creek without a paddle, ain’t’cha.”

“We had hoped that Charles would be able to help us,” Hank admitted. “Once ‘Charles Xavier’ is out of the public eye, his location and status will be top secret as a matter of national security. Only a handful of people will know where he is at any given time. That’s not so many minds for a strong telepath to wipe, or tweak so they don’t think anything out of the ordinary about an empty cell.”

“So use Jean. She’s more than strong enough,” Psylocke said.

“We’re still wary of asking for too much precision work from Jean. She’s strong but unfocused. I’m not sure she has the delicate touch—”

“Fuck the delicate touch! So she scrambles their brains, who cares? Plenty of people at that level have nervous breakdowns. Say it’s a guilty conscience and call it a fucking day.”

There was a beat of silence. No one had anticipated that kind of outburst. Even Psylocke hadn’t seen it coming until the words were in the air, so unexpected they might have come from someone else.

Equally surprising, Lehnsherr recovered first. “So _that’s_ what it looks like when you give a shit about someone else.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” she shot back. Blushing—fucking hell, she was actually blushing. And Lehnsherr’s smirk confirmed that he’d noticed.

“Oh, not us. You’ve left no room for doubt there. Raven, though.”

“Well _someone_ has to give a shit about her, don’t they?”

Low blow there, but she lifted her chin and met Lehnsherr’s scowl, refusing to back down in front of the rest of them. Still, in the privacy of her own thoughts she was reeling a little. Where was this coming from? Sure, she’d always respected Mystique, maybe even liked her as far as she liked anyone. But that was miles from this—going to bat against her friends and family because it was…the right thing to do? But that felt suspiciously like taking a moral stand. And she didn’t do moral stands. She also didn’t do groups and she didn’t do teams; Cairo had been a solid reminder of what happened when she tried.

Then why, even now, was she still playing by their rules? If she was so desperate to have Mystique’s back why hadn’t she finished this already? Five minutes to pin down a location and Mystique could be sitting at the kitchen table with the rest of them. Fuck what the others thought and fuck the consequences.

…right?

She needed a distraction before confusion spiked into anger, and Howlett delivered. He’d been mostly quiet since his opening spiel, assessing the situation, but had apparently hit the limit for what he was willing to sit through.

 “How about we cut the schoolgirl sniping and go back to the part where you hoped Charles would help. In the past tense.”

“His powers were damaged by the suppression device they forced him to wear,” McCoy said, going for broke. “No telepathy since we broke him out. And he’s gotten a lot worse over the past few days, psychologically.”

“Worse than…” Howlett trailed off significantly, and they had an entire silent conversation that confused Psylocke as much as it pissed off Lehnsherr, if his sour expression was anything to go by. Finally McCoy sighed.

“You’d better come see.”

Howlett balked a little. Just a slight twitch by his jaw, barely visible underneath the unkempt beard, but enough to convey that whatever the story was between him and McCoy, Xavier was at the center of it in a way that made _the_ Wolverine uneasy—the same guy whose unflappability was a legend on the mutant underground. The only thing that ruffled him was when some idiot got between him and his whiskey.

That, and the thought of seeing Charles Xavier, as it turned out.

At least Lehnsherr agreed with him on something now. “This is a bad idea. We can’t put Charles through this right now. No new stress factors, no surprise visitors.”

“Or what, he gets worse? I’m not even sure that’s possible, Erik.”

“He’s been through enough trauma—”

“Oh, I’m _trauma_ now?” Howlett echoed sarcastically. “Coming from Magneto that’s rich—”

Psylocke tuned out their alpha male bullshit. The seed of an idea had been germinating since she mentioned Moscow in the foyer, growing every time she thought back to those old jobs, to the Soviet technology she’d nicked for Howlett and Mystique. Sometimes information too, files, floppy disks, things she never bothered to flip through because what did she care what any of it said. She didn’t get paid to care about the secrets of global superpowers—just to deliver them. Was probably safer not knowing, anyway. The things some people would do for that kind of information…at least Mystique used it for the good of mutantkind. And she’d been thinking of Mystique too, the way she operated, how she’d never hesitated to deal with anyone as long as it got her what she wanted.

The idea blossomed and she grabbed it before it could vanish, slamming both hands on the table to catch everyone’s attention.

“What’s the United States government more afraid of than mutants?”

Total silence, and four pairs of wide eyes looking at her like she was crazy. She hit the table again to snap them out of it.

“It’s not a rhetorical question, people.”

Lehnsherr shrugged. “Nothing. They’re more frightened of us than any human weapon.”

“If that were true, would Weinberger and Webster have allowed a public trial on charges of treason?”

“No,” MacTaggart said. “They’d have stashed Charles in a black site and never mentioned his name again. Eliminated all evidence.”

Psylocke nodded. “So why public, and why treason?”

“To prove a point to the country, and to the world. It equates the elimination of our nuclear arsenal with a direct attack on America itself. Puts the stability of the war machine above the rights of citizens.” McCoy paused, squinting a little as he stared into space. She’d seen that look before, when he was on the verge of some nerd breakthrough in the lab, and silently encouraged him to put those last few pieces together. “It also emphasizes that the Cold War isn’t over just because the weapons are gone and redefines patriotism as enthusiastic support of President Reagan’s rush to escalate again. And does it all constantly, on the front page of every newspaper and the top of every newscast. The message never dies.”

“Hold up,” Howlett said. “ _Communism_? You think people are more afraid of _communism_ than mutants?”

God, she’d forgotten what an asshole he could be.

“I think the American government has invested decades and billions into this conflict with the Soviets, and more of it is ideological propaganda than you think. I think the idea of a global shift that ends the United States as a world superpower scares the shit out of them, yeah. And I think Reagan’s planning to ride to reelection on a wave of Cold War scare tactics that include a guilty verdict in the Xavier trial.”

“Not that playing global geopolitics isn’t fascinating, but…so what?” MacTaggart asked.

“So _playing global geopolitics_ is how we get Mystique back. Let them have their guilty verdict.  After that they’re going to _beg_ to give her back to us.”

“What the fuck would inspire them to do that?” Lehnsherr sighed.

“A simple trade. Mystique for victory in the Cold War.” She paused, unabashedly reveling in their second round of shocked silence in as many minutes. Her flair for the dramatic had gotten precious little chance to flourish of late. “How about it? Everyone up for a little international espionage?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm getting to comments now I PROMISE <3s


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